Jaegwon Kim (born 1934 in
DaeguDaegu , also spelled Taegu, and officially called the Daegu Metropolitan City, with over 2.5 million people, is the fourth largest city in South Korea after Seoul, Busan, and Incheon...
,
KoreaKorea is a civilization and formerly unified nation currently divided into two states. Located on the Korean Peninsula, it borders China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait....
(now in
South KoreaSouth Korea, officially the Republic of Korea and often simply referred to as Korea, is a country in East Asia, located on the southern half of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by China to the west, Japan to the east, and North Korea to the north. Its capital is Seoul, the second largest...
)) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
philosopher currently working at
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III...
. He is best known for his work on
mental causationThe problem of mental causation is a conceptual issue in the philosophy of mind. That problem, in short, is how to account for the common-sense idea that intentional thoughts or intentional mental states are causes of intentional actions...
and the
mind-body problemThe mind-body dichotomy is the view that "mental" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-physical" . In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul...
. Key themes in his work include: a rejection of
CartesianRené Descartes , , also known as Renatus Cartesius , was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic...
metaphysicsMetaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world...
, the limitations of strict
psychophysical identityThe mind-body dichotomy is the view that "mental" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-physical" . In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul...
,
supervenienceIn philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship, typically held to obtain between sets of properties. According to one standard definition, a set of properties A supervenes on a set of properties B, if and only if any two objects x and y which share all properties in B must also...
, and the individuation of events. Kim's work on these and other contemporary
metaphysicalMetaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world...
and
epistemologicalEpistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge...
issues is well-represented by the papers collected in
Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (1993).
Kim took two years of college in Seoul, Korea as a
French literatureFrench literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak other traditional non-French languages. Literature written by citizens of other nations such as...
major, before transferring to
Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. Incorporated as "Trustees of Dartmouth College," it is a member of the Ivy League and one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution...
in 1955.
Jaegwon Kim (born 1934 in
DaeguDaegu , also spelled Taegu, and officially called the Daegu Metropolitan City, with over 2.5 million people, is the fourth largest city in South Korea after Seoul, Busan, and Incheon...
,
KoreaKorea is a civilization and formerly unified nation currently divided into two states. Located on the Korean Peninsula, it borders China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait....
(now in
South KoreaSouth Korea, officially the Republic of Korea and often simply referred to as Korea, is a country in East Asia, located on the southern half of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by China to the west, Japan to the east, and North Korea to the north. Its capital is Seoul, the second largest...
)) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
philosopher currently working at
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III...
. He is best known for his work on
mental causationThe problem of mental causation is a conceptual issue in the philosophy of mind. That problem, in short, is how to account for the common-sense idea that intentional thoughts or intentional mental states are causes of intentional actions...
and the
mind-body problemThe mind-body dichotomy is the view that "mental" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-physical" . In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul...
. Key themes in his work include: a rejection of
CartesianRené Descartes , , also known as Renatus Cartesius , was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic...
metaphysicsMetaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world...
, the limitations of strict
psychophysical identityThe mind-body dichotomy is the view that "mental" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-physical" . In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul...
,
supervenienceIn philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship, typically held to obtain between sets of properties. According to one standard definition, a set of properties A supervenes on a set of properties B, if and only if any two objects x and y which share all properties in B must also...
, and the individuation of events. Kim's work on these and other contemporary
metaphysicalMetaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world...
and
epistemologicalEpistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge...
issues is well-represented by the papers collected in
Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (1993).
Biography
Kim took two years of college in Seoul, Korea as a
French literatureFrench literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak other traditional non-French languages. Literature written by citizens of other nations such as...
major, before transferring to
Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private, coeducational university located in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. Incorporated as "Trustees of Dartmouth College," it is a member of the Ivy League and one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution...
in 1955. Soon after, at Dartmouth, he changed to a combined major in
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
,
mathematicsMathematics is the science and study of quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns, formulate new conjectures, and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions....
, and philosophy and received a B.A. degree. After Dartmouth, he went to
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University a private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and is considered one of the Colonial Colleges....
, where he earned his
Ph.D.Ph.D. or PHD may stand for:* Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group* Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip* PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* Parisada Hindu Dharma, an Indonesian organization...
in philosophy.
Kim is currently the William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III...
(since 1987). He has also taught at
Swarthmore CollegeSwarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
,
Cornell UniversityCornell University is a private university located in Ithaca, New York, USA, that is a member of the Ivy League.Cornell counts more than 255,000 living alumni, 28 Rhodes Scholars and 41 Nobel laureates affiliated with the university as faculty or students...
, the
University of Notre DameThe University of Notre Dame du Lac is a private Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, Indiana, USA....
,
Johns Hopkins UniversityThe Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Johns Hopkins also maintains full-time campuses elsewhere in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Italy, China, and Singapore...
, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. From 1988–1989, he was president of the
American Philosophical AssociationThe American Philosophical Association is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work...
, Central Division. Since 1991, he has been a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and SciencesThe American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
. And, along with
Ernest SosaErnest Sosa is currently Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has been at Rutgers full-time since January, 2007; previously, he had been at Brown University since 1964. While full-time at Brown, he was also a distinguished visiting professor at Rutgers every spring...
, he is a joint editor of the quarterly philosophical journal
NoûsNoûs is a philosophy journal published four times per year by Blackwell Publishing. It was founded by Hector-Neri Castañeda and is currently edited by Ernest Sosa...
.
According to Kim, two of his major philosophical influences are Carl Hempel and
Roderick ChisholmRoderick M. Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, and the philosophy of perception. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University under Clarence Irving Lewis and Donald C...
. Hempel, who sent him a letter encouraging him to go to Princeton, was a "formative influence". More specifically, Kim claims that he hope 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" which allowed him to extend logical positivist approach of investigation (that he learned from Hempel) to metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
Work
Kim's philosophical work focuses on the areas of
philosophy of mindPhilosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
,
metaphysicsMetaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world...
,
action theoryAction theory is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing intentional human bodily movements of more or less complex kind. This area of thought has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics...
,
epistemologyEpistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge...
, and
philosophy of scienceThe philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, and implications of science. The field is defined by an interest in one of a set of "traditional" problems or an interest in central or foundational concerns in science...
.
Philosophy of mind
Kim has defended various mind-body theories during his career. He began defending a version of the identity theory in the early 1970s, and then moved to a non-reductive version of
physicalismPhysicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things...
, which relied heavily on the
supervenienceIn philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship, typically held to obtain between sets of properties. According to one standard definition, a set of properties A supervenes on a set of properties B, if and only if any two objects x and y which share all properties in B must also...
relation.
More recently, he has rejected physicalism on the grounds that it is insufficient in explanatory power to solve the mind-body problem. 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"Qualia" , singular "quale" , from the Latin for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the redness of an evening sky...
(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.
Kim currently defends 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
epiphenomenalIn philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism, also known as 'Type-E Dualism', is a view according to which some or all mental states are mere epiphenomena of physical states of the world...
. He, thus, defends a version of
dualismIn philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.Ideas on mind/body dualism originate at least as far back as Zarathushtra...
, although Kim argues that it is physicalism near enough. As of March, 2008, Kim still sees physicalism to be the most comprehensive world view that is irreplaceable with any other world view .
In a 2008 interview with Korean daily newspaper
Joongang IlboJoongAng Ilbo is a conservative newspaper published in Seoul, South Korea. It is one of the "big three newspapers" in South Korea. It has a circulation of 1.96 million copies in South Korea . Its average page count per copy is around 52...
, 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 believes that any correct explanation for the nature of mind would come from natural science rather than philosophy or psychology .
Metaphysics
Kim's work in metaphysics focuses primarily on events and properties.
Kim developed an
eventIn philosophy, events are objects in time or instantiations of properties in objects. However, a definite definition has not been reached, as multiple theories exist concerning events.-Kim’s Property-Exemplification Account of Events:...
identity theory, but has not defended it recently. This theory holds that events are identical if and only if they occur in the same time and place and instantiate the same property. Thus if one waves ten fingers, several events occur, including the waving of an even number of fingers, the event of waving fingers that are evenly divisible by five, and evenly divisible by ten. Some have criticized his theory as producing too many events.
Kim also theorized that events are structured. He is known for a property-exemplification account of events. They are composed of three things: Object(s), a property and time or a temporal interval. Events are defined using the operation [x ,P, t].
A unique event is defined by two principles: the existence condition and the identity condition. The existence condition states "[x, P, t] exists if and only if object x exemplifies the n-adic P at time t". This means a unique event exists if the above is met. The identity condition states "[x, P, t] is [y, Q, t`] if and only if x=y, P=Q and t=t`]".
Epistemology
Kim is a critic of the "naturalized"
epistemologyEpistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge...
popularized by
Willard Van Orman QuineWillard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...
in the latter half of the twentieth century. Kim's influential article "What is 'Naturalized Epistemology'?" (1988) argues that "naturalized" epistemologies are not proper epistemologies as they are merely descriptive in scope, while one generally expects an "epistemology" to make normative claims about knowledge. Kim claims that epistemology requires normative nature, and mere description cannot account for justified belief. Naturalized epistemology cannot address the issue of justification, and therefore it does not share the same aspiration as the traditional approach to epistemology. The status of descriptive belief remains as belief, not knowledge. As such, naturalized epistemologies cannot be used to answer many of the questions one would expect theories of knowledge – epistemologies – to resolve.
Selected publications
The following is a
partial list of publications by Jaegwon Kim. See Kim's web page at Brown for a
more extensive list of publications.
- (1984) "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. IX, Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 257-70.
- (1988) "What is 'Naturalized Epistemology'?", Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 2 (1988): 381-405.
- (1993) Supervenience and Mind, Cambridge University Press.
- (1998) Mind in a Physical World, MIT Press.
- (2005) Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Princeton University Press. (Chapter 1 PDF)
- (2006) Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed., Westview Press.
External links