Jaegwon Kim Quotes
Jaegwon Kim was a Korean-American analytic philosopher, long associated with Brown University, and one of the most influential philosophers of mind of his generation. His early essays on supervenience set the technical vocabulary for late-twentieth-century debates about the relation of mental and physical properties, while Mind in a Physical World formulated his exclusion problem, according to which the causal closure of the physical leaves no work for irreducibly mental causes. The quotes below are attributed to Jaegwon Kim, organized by topic.
Jaegwon Kim on Mind
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Attributed to Jaegwon Kim:
“If the physical realm is causally closed, mental properties must either be physical or be epiphenomenal.”
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Attributed to Jaegwon Kim:
“Supervenience without reduction is a metaphysical free lunch we cannot afford.”
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Attributed to Jaegwon Kim:
“Mental causation is the heart of the mind-body problem.”
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Attributed to Jaegwon Kim:
“Physicalism is the price we pay for taking causation seriously.”
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Attributed to Jaegwon Kim:
“Some qualia may resist physical reduction; everything else does not.”