18 Facts About Jaegwon Kim

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

Jaegwon Kim 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.

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

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

Jaegwon Kim was the Emeritus William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University.

Jaegwon Kim 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.

Jaegwon Kim 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.

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

He, thus defended a version of property dualism, although Jaegwon Kim argued his position was "something near enough" physicalism.

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

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

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

Jaegwon Kim argues that mental causation can only be preserved by rejecting the premise of irreducibility in favor of reduction; in order for mental properties to be considered causally efficacious, they must be reducible to physical properties.

Jaegwon Kim developed an event identity theory, but has not defended it recently.

Jaegwon Kim is known for a property-exemplification account of events.

Jaegwon Kim is a critic of the naturalized epistemology popularized by Willard Van Orman Quine in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Jaegwon Kim argues that mere description of belief-forming practices cannot account for justified belief.