Jaegwon Kim

Jaegwon Kim (September 12, 1934 – November 27, 2019) was a Korean-American philosopher.

At the time of his death, Kim was an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brown University.

He also taught at several other leading American universities during his lifetime, including the University of Michigan, Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins University, and Swarthmore College.

He is best known for his work on mental causation, the mind-body problem and the metaphysics of supervenience and events.

Key themes in his work include: a rejection of Cartesian metaphysics, the limitations of strict psychophysical identity, supervenience, and the individuation of events.

Kim took two years of college in Seoul, South Korea as a French literature major, before transferring to Dartmouth College in 1955.

Soon after, at Dartmouth, he changed to a combined major in French, mathematics, and philosophy, and received a B.A. degree.

After Dartmouth, he went to Princeton University, where he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy.

He began defending a version of the identity theory in the early 1970s, and then moved to a non-reductive version of physicalism, which relied heavily on the supervenience relation.

Kim eventually rejected strict physicalism on the grounds that it provided an insufficient basis for resolving the mind-body problem.

In particular, he concluded that the hard problem of consciousness—according to which a detailed and comprehensive neurophysical description of the brain would still not account for the fact of consciousness—is insurmountable in the context of a thoroughgoing physicalism.

Kim was the Emeritus William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University (since 1987).

He also taught at Swarthmore College, Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins University, and, for many years, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

From 1988 to 1989, he was president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division.

Since 1991, he has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Along with Ernest Sosa, he was a joint editor of the quarterly philosophical journal Noûs.

According to Kim, two of his major philosophical influences are Carl Hempel and Roderick Chisholm.

Hempel, who sent him a letter encouraging him to go to Princeton, was a "formative influence".

More specifically, Kim claims that he hopes he learned "a certain style of philosophy, one that emphasizes clarity, responsible argument, and aversion to studied obscurities and feigned profundities."

From Chisholm he learned "not to fear metaphysics."

This allowed him to go beyond the logical positivist approaches, that he had learned from Hempel, in his investigations in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

Although not a logical positivist, Kim's work always respected the limitations on philosophical speculation imposed by the sciences.

Kim's philosophical work focuses on the areas of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, action theory, epistemology, and philosophy of science.

Kim has defended various mind-body theories during his career.

Kim's work on these and other contemporary metaphysical and epistemological issues is well represented by the papers collected in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (1993).

His arguments against physicalism can be found in his two latest monographs: Mind in a Physical World (1998) and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005).

Kim claims "that physicalism will not be able to survive intact and in its entirety."

This, according to Kim, is because qualia (the phenomenal or qualitative aspect of mental states) cannot be reduced to physical states or processes.

Kim claims that "phenomenal mental properties are not functionally definable and hence functionally irreducible" and "if functional reduction doesn't work for qualia, nothing will."

Thus, there is an aspect of the mind that physicalism cannot capture.

In his later years, Kim defended the thesis that intentional mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) can be functionally reduced to their neurological realizers, but that the qualitative or phenomenal mental states (e.g., sensations) are irreducibly non-physical and epiphenomenal.

He, thus defended a version of dualism, although Kim argues that it is physicalism near enough.

As of March, 2008, Kim still saw physicalism to be the most comprehensive worldview that is irreplaceable with any other world view.

In a 2008 interview with Korean daily newspaper Joongang Ilbo, Kim stated that we must seek a naturalistic explanation for mind because mind is a natural phenomenon, and supernatural explanation only provides "one riddle over another".

He believed that any correct explanation for the nature of mind would come from natural science rather than philosophy or psychology.

Kim has raised an objection based on causal closure and overdetermination to non-reductive physicalism.

The non-reductive physicalist is committed to following three principles: the irreducibility of the mental to the physical, some version of mental-physical supervenience, and the causal efficaciousness of mental states.

The problem, according to Kim, is that when these three commitments are combined with a few other well-accepted principles, an inconsistency is generated that entails the causal impotence of mental properties.

The first principle, which most ontological physicalists would accept, is the causal closure of the physical domain, according to which, every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause.

The second principle Kim notes is that of causal exclusion, which holds that no normal event can have more than one sufficient cause.