Jaegwon Kim

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Jaegwon Kim (born September 12, 1934 in Daegu , now South Korea , † November 27, 2019 ) was an American philosopher of Korean descent, who had his main areas of work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology . After graduating from Princeton University , Kim was Professor of Philosophy at Brown University . In 1991 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The philosopher Terence Horgan is one of Kim's most famous students .

Supervenience

Kim was one of the fathers of the modern concept of supervenience . In his essay Mental Events, Donald Davidson introduced the idea of ​​“supervenience” to the philosophy of mind in order to formulate a non-reductive materialism . The core idea of ​​the concept of supervenience is that B supervises over A, precisely when nothing about B can be changed without A changing as well. Mental states thus supervise over neural states when no mental state can change without a neurobiological state changing.

In a critical analysis of Davidson, Kim further differentiated the concept of supervenience. Important sub-terms here are 1) Weak supervenience 2) Global supervenience and 3) Strong supervenience. Kim thinks that 1) and 2) cannot guarantee materialism. On the other hand, 3) is sufficient for materialism and reduction. The idea of ​​a non-reductive materialism thus becomes doubtful.

The myth of non-reductive materialism

Starting from Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor , non-reductive materialism, which is closely linked to functionalism , was popularized in the 1960s and 1970s . The central argument is based on the phenomenon of multiple realization : There can be different realizations of the same higher-level state, so this cannot be reduced to a lower-level state. An example: The psychological state of pain can be realized both within a single being and in different beings through completely different neurobiological states. So pain cannot be identical to one of these neurobiological states and it cannot therefore be reduced to one.

Kim nevertheless considered non-reductive materialism to be a myth and asked: If, for example, a mental state M can be realized through very different physical states P1 or P2 or ..., why then cannot the mental state be reduced to the disjunction of the physical states (M = P1 or P2 or ...)? Kim discussed various answers (e.g. that the disjunction could be infinite or not a natural species), but said he could reject them all.

Mental causation

According to Kim, mental causation is another serious problem for the non-reductivist. The following seems clear: Mental states are effective in action. For example, if I burn my hand and pull it back, it is because I am in pain. But now comes the problem: There is also a biological story about hand withdrawal that does without mental states: I bring the hand to the fire, signals are sent to the brain, complex processes happen there and finally a signal is sent to the arm muscles, that causes me to withdraw my hand. Now what is the real cause of the hand withdrawal: the pain or the biological process described? Kim believed that there was only one way to solve the problem: if we reduce the pain to the brain states, the problem will be resolved, because the pain is part of the biological process.

Works

  • Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1995, ISBN 0-521-43394-0 .
  • Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation . MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1998, ISBN 0-262-11234-5 .
  • Philosophy of Mind . (3rd edition) Westview Press, Boulder 2000, ISBN 0-8133-4458-1 .
  • Physicalism, or Something Near Enough . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2005, ISBN 0-691-11375-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Oxford Index
  2. Jaegwon Kim (1934-2019). Retrieved November 30, 2019 .
  3. Jaegwon Kims Curriculum Vitae  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / research.brown.edu