Philosophy Faculty

Jaegwon Kim received his PhD from Princeton in 1962 and has taught at Swarthmore College, the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and Johns Hopkins, as well as at Brown, both from 1963–67 and since 1987. He is presently William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy. Kim is past President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kim's research spans the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, action theory, epistemology, and philosophy of science. He is author of dozens of widely cited articles and of four books: Supervenience and Mind (a collection of his papers); Philosophy of Mind (a well-regarded textbook); Mind in a Physical World (a monograph); and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (another monograph).

Kim's current work concerns physicalism, reduction and reductionism, mental causation and the exclusion argument, the explanatory argument for type physicalism, self-knowledge and agency, subjectivity and normativity, the agent's point of view in the explanation and understanding of actions, and laws and explanations in the special sciences.