The aim of this paper is to show that Kim’s ‚supervenience argument’ is at best inconclusive and so fails to provide an adequate
challenge to nonreductive physicalism. I shall argue, first, that Kim’s argument rests on assumptions that the nonreductive
physicalist is entitled to regard as question-begging; second, that even if those assumptions are granted, it is not clear
that irreducible mental causes fail to␣satisfy them; and, third, that since the argument has the overall structure of a
reductio, which of its various premises one performs the reductio on remains open to debate in an interesting way. I shall finally
suggest that the issue of reductive vs. nonreductive physicalism is best contested not in the arena of mental causation but
in that in which the issues pertaining to theory and property reduction are currently being debated.
Keywords Kim - nonreductive physicalism - supervenience - mental causation