Jaegwon Kim

Jaegwon Kim ( born September 12, 1934 in Daegu, South Korea today ) is an American philosopher of Korean descent, has his main areas of work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. After studying at Princeton University Kim is now Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. At Kim's most famous pupils of the philosopher Terence Horgan heard.

Supervenience

Kim is one of the fathers of modern Supervenienzbegriffs. Donald Davidson had introduced in his paper Mental events, the idea of ​​" supervenience " in the philosophy of mind, in order to formulate a non-reductive materialism. The core idea of ​​the Supervenienzbegriffs is that B supervenes on A, if and only if nothing can be change to B, without that also modifies A. So mental states supervene on neural states when there is no mental state can change without changing a neurobiological condition.

Kim has further differentiated the Supervenienzbegriff in critical discussion about Davidson. Important part terms are here 1) Weak supervenience 2 ) Global supervenience and 3 ) Strong supervenience. Kim thinks that 1 ) and 2) can not guarantee materialism. On the other hand is 3) sufficient for materialism and reduction. The idea of ​​a non-reductive materialism is thus doubtful.

The myth of nonreductive materialism

Starting from Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor of nonreductive materialism was made popular in the 1960s and 1970s, which is closely connected with the functionalism. The central argument is based on the phenomenon of multiple realization: There may be different realizations of the same higher-level state, so this is not reduced to a lower -level state. An example: The mental state of pain can be implemented both within a single, as well as different beings by each quite different neurobiological states. So can not be identical with one of these neurobiological condition pain and it can therefore not be reduced to such a.

Kim keeps the non-reductive materialism still a myth and asks: When about a mental state M or ... can be realized by quite different physical states P1 or P2, then why can not the mental state of the disjunction of physical states reduce (M = P1 or P2 or ... )? However, Kim discusses various responses (eg, that the disjunction could be infinite or no natural way representative ), she thinks that he can reject all.

Mental causation

After Kim the Mental causation is another serious problem for the Nichtreduktivisten. Seems clear that mental states are to act effectively. If I burn my about my hand and they retire, so I 'm doing this because I'm in pain. But now comes the problem: There is also a biological story about the manual retraction, which requires no mental states: I lead the hand to the fire, it is sent to the brain signals, there happen to complex processes and finally a signal to the arm muscles is sent, the leads that I withdraw the hand. Now, what is now the real cause of the retraction of the hand: the pain or the described biological process? Kim believes that the problem can be solved in only one way: If we reduce the pain to the brain states, then solves the problem, because the pain is part of the biological process.

Works

• Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. 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 0-813-34458-1.
• Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, ISBN 0-691-11375-0.