Kim Jaegwon

Kim Jaegwon, also known as Jaegwon Kim, lived from 1934 to 2019 and was a Korean-American philosopher who taught at Michigan, Cornell, Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins, Swarthmore College and, finally, as an emeritus professor at Brown University. He is best known for his work on mental causation, the mind-body problem, and the metaphysics of supervenience and events, most notably his causal exclusion argument, which challenges non-reductive physicalism by arguing that treating both mental and physical events as causes of the same behavior produces problematic overdetermination. He defended a position allowing that intentional mental states are reducible to neurology while phenomenal, qualitative experience remains irreducibly non-physical, publishing this view across books including Supervenience and Mind in 1993, Mind in a Physical World in 1998, and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough in 2005.