Jaegwon Kim

Jaegwon Kim was a Korean-born American philosopher who taught at the University of Michigan and for many years at Brown University. He clarified the notion of supervenience and used it to press the causal exclusion argument: if every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause, then irreducible mental or emergent properties seem to have no causal work left to do. The argument posed a lasting challenge to non-reductive physicalism and to downward causation.

Key ideas

• Supervenience: there can be no difference in higher-level properties without a difference in their physical base.
• Causal exclusion: if a physical cause is sufficient for an effect, a distinct mental cause is either redundant or overdetermining.
• Non-reductive physicalism therefore struggles to give mental properties genuine causal powers.
• Many mental properties can be functionally reduced, though qualitative experience may resist reduction.

Major works

• Supervenience and Mind (1993)
• Philosophy of Mind (1996)
• Mind in a Physical World (1998)
• Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005)

In the conversation

• Question How can a thought move an arm if physics already explains every movement? Serkan Aydoğdu · 4 replies
• Debate Kim was right: non-reductive physicalism cannot give the mind any causal work Priya Raghavan · 5 replies