Jaegwon Kim (1934– ) is a philosopher especially acclaimed for his work in the field of philosophy of mind. He is best known for his work on mental causation and the mind-body problem. Key themes in his work include: a rejection of Cartesian metaphysics, the limitations of strict psychophysical identity, supervenience, and how to individuate events. 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).

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 physicalism which relied heavily on the supervenience relation. More recently, he has, through arguments which can be found in his two latest monographs Mind in a Physical World (1998) and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005), rejected both these positions on the grounds that they are insufficient with respect to the explanatory power required to solve the mind-body problem. He currently defends the thesis that intentional mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) can be functionally reduced to their neurological realizers. Phenomenally conscious states, however (e.g., sensations), he believes to be irreducibly non-physical and epiphenomenal, thereby identifying himself as a dualist.

Kim also developed an event 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 even divisible by five, and evenly divisible by ten. Some have criticized his theory as producing too many events.

Jaegwon Kim's research interests also include action theory and philosophy of science.

Curriculum Vitae

Kim has earned a B.A. at Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. at Princeton University. He has taught at Swarthmore College, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University and University of Michigan. Since 1987, he is the William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He was president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, from 1988-89. He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991. Along with Ernest Sosa, he is a joint editor of the quarterly philosophical journal Noûs.

Kim’s Property-Exemplification Account of Events

Kim theorized that events are structured. They are composed of three things: Object(s), a property and time or a temporal interval. Events are defined using the operation ,P, t. A unique event is defined by two principles: the existence condition and the identity condition. The existence condition states “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 “P, t is Q, t` if and only if x=y, P=Q and t=t`].

Selected publications

• Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World (MIT Press, 1998)
• Jaegwon Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton University Press, 2005)
• Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed. (Westview Press, 2006)

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