Jaegwon Kim
Key themes in his work include: a rejection of Cartesian metaphysics, the limitations of strict psychophysical identity, supervenience, and the individuation of 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).
[3] Kim was the Emeritus William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University (since 1987).
[3] 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.
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.
[3] Although not a logical positivist, Kim's work always respected the limitations on philosophical speculation imposed by the sciences.
[6] 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.
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 second principle Kim notes is that of causal exclusion, which holds that no normal event can have more than one sufficient cause.
The non-reductive physicalist is forced to choose between two unappealing options: one could reject the causal-exclusion principle and claim that in this scenario we are dealing with a genuine case of overdetermination, or one could embrace epiphenomenalism.
[citation needed] Kim is a critic of the naturalized epistemology popularized by Willard Van Orman Quine in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Kim argues that mere description of belief-forming practices cannot account for justified belief.
(He also argues that to even individuate beliefs, the naturalized epistemologist must presuppose normative criteria of justification.)
