MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 30: UPDATED
One of the most influential contributors to metaphysics and the philosophy of mind of the last half-century, Professor Kim taught from 1963-1967 and then from 1987 onwards at Brown University (where he was emeritus), but also spent some two decades at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with briefer stints as a tenured faculty member at both Cornell and Johns Hopkins Universities. Although I did not study directly with Kim, I always viewed his work as a model of analytic philosophy in the post-WWII period at its best. He inherited from his teacher Carl Hempel a concern for precision and clarity of argumentation rivaled by only a handful of his contemporaries. I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.
UPDATE: Reader Robert Allen kindly shared this charming story:
Everyone knows Jaegwon Kim was an immortal philosopher. But I had the good fortune of seeing what a kind-hearted man he was. He came to Wayne State University in the late 80s on the occasion of Professor Richard 'Brad' Angell's retirement. A sad day. The department chair introduced him before his lecture, concluding with the title of his paper, something technical like 'Supervenience and Reduction'. Professor Kim responded 'Thank you, Mike, for the generous introduction, but you got one thing wrong. The title of my paper is, An Essay in Honor of Brad Angell.'
UPDATE: A memorial notice from the Brown Department:
It is with great sorrow that the Department of Philosophy of Brown University reports the passing of Jaegwon Kim, William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy emeritus, on November 27, 2019. Professor Kim was eighty-five years old.
Born in Daegu, Korea, in 1934, Professor Kim studied French literature at Seoul National University (1953-55) before graduating summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1958, with a combined major in French, mathematics, and philosophy. He earned his PhD in Philosophy at Princeton University in 1962. At Princeton Kim was influenced by the teaching of Carl G. Hempel and the publications of Roderick Chisholm; both were among the great American philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, and Chisholm, the leading light of the Brown department for much of that period, would later become Kim’s colleague. After teaching for two years at Swarthmore College, Kim taught at Brown from 1963 to 1967 and at the University of Michigan from 1967 to 1987, where he chaired the philosophy department for eight years and was awarded the title of Roy Wood Sellars Professor of Philosophy, in honor of one of the great American philosophers of the first part of the twentieth century. He was also a visiting professor at Cornell and the Johns Hopkins Universities. He returned to Brown in 1987 and taught here until his retirement in 2014. He was the chair of the Department during a period of rebuilding in the 1990s when a continuing core of the present Department was appointed. Kim earned research grants from the ACLS, NSF, and NEH, and was awarded the Kyung-Ahm Prize of the Kyung-Ahm Cultural and Educational Foundation in 2014. Kim was President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1988-89, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991. From 2000 to 2005, Kim co-edited the journal Nous with his colleague Ernest Sosa, who also spent much of his career at Brown. Literature as well as music remained lifelong interests for Professor Kim, and he devoted much of his time in retirement to reading poetry and listening to music. Throughout his life, Professor Kim was generous to students and colleagues, and beloved for his character as well as admired for his work. He was considered a star in his native Korea although he spent his career in the US.
Professor Kim was known for his work in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. His books included Supervenience and Mind (1993), Mind in a Physical World (1998), Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005), the survey Philosophy of Mind (second edition, 2006), Trois essais sur l’émergence (2006), and Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (2010). He was also the editor or co-editor of five anthologies of philosophical essays on metaphysics and epistemology, four of them with Ernest Sosa, and numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Kim explored the challenges for a naturalistic approach to philosophy. He rejected any appeal to the supernatural in philosophy as simply substituting “one riddle for another,” but argued that sensations or "qualia," the mental or qualitative aspects of mental states, although in some sense clearly caused by physical states, could not easily be reduced to physical properties of brain-states. This issue led Kim to rigorous and detailed examination of the concept of “supervenience,” a term for the relation in which one property is neither strictly identical to nor caused by another yet varies with it. He distinguished this relation from that of “emergence” and refined previous understandings of it. His question also led to a detailed studies of the concept of causation itself, a central concept of metaphysics; Kim was indeed in good part responsible for revived interest in metaphysics after critiques of it from Kant to Wittgenstein. Here the question became how can we maintain a commitment to the causal closure of physics, that is, our assumption that there is in principle an adequate physical explanation of any event in the physical world, and yet maintain the causal significance of mental events, that is, that they are not just “epiphenomenal” consciousness of physical events but play a genuine role in determining subsequent events? In the theory of knowledge, Kim criticized the well-known "naturalized epistemology" of Willard Van Orman Quine, arguing that a purely descriptive approach to belief-forming practices cannot account for the justification of knowledge-claims, although constructing a theory of such justification has traditionally been taken to be the task of epistemology. In all these areas, Professor Kim argued for the necessity of incorporating the qualitative dimensions of human experience and cognition into a naturalistic world-picture. By such arguments Professor Kim clarified and refined concepts often taken for granted, by means of argumentation with a form and content subtly different from that of colleagues close and far who were battling over these and related issues. In so doing, he challenged and inspired several generations of his own students and of philosophers world-wide.
Professor Kim leaves his wife Sylvia, his son Justin, and many students, colleagues, and admirers throughout the philosophical profession in the US and abroad.
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