Synopses & Reviews
Jaegwon Kim presents a selection of his essays from the last two decades. The volume includes three new essays, on an agent-centered first-person account of action explanation, the concepts of realization and their bearings on the mind-body problem, and the nonexistence of laws in the special sciences. Among other topics covered are emergence and emergentism, the nature of explanation and of theories of explanation, reduction and reductive explanation, mental causation and explanatory exclusion. Kim tackles questions such as: How should we understand the concept of "emergence", and what are the prospects of emergentism as a doctrine about the status of minds? What does an agent-centered, first-person account of explanation of human actions look like? Why aren't there strict laws in the special sciences - sciences like biology, psychology, and sociology? The essays will be accessible to attentive readers without an extensive philosophical background.
Review
"It is written in Kim's usual lucid and concise style and offers novel and intriguing arguments that will be of great interest to all philosophers of mind (and beyond)." --Metapsychology
About the Author
Jaegwon Kim received his PhD from Princeton University in 1962 and has taught at Swarthmore College, the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and University of Notre Dame. He is presently William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. Kim is past President of the American Philosophical Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Table of Contents
1. Making sense of emergence
2. The layered world: Metaphysical considerations
3. Emergence: Core ideas and issues
4. "Supervenient and yet not deducible": Is there a coherent concept of ontological emergence?
5. Reasons and the first person
6. Taking the agent's point of view seriously in action explanation
7. Explanatory realism, causal realism, and explanatory exclusion
8. Explanatory knowledge and metaphysical dependence
9. Hempel, explanation, metaphysics
10. Reduction and reductive explanation: Is one possible without the other?
11. Can supervenience and "non-strict" laws save anomalous monism?
12. Causation and mental causation
13. Two concepts of realization, mental causation, and physicalism
14. Why there are no laws in the special sciences: Three arguments
Index