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A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste—Critical Notice: Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Clark Glymour
Clark Glymour*
Affiliation:
Departments of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California-San Diego
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Abstract

Jaegwon Kim's Mind in a Physical World is an argument about mental causation that provides both a metaphysical theory and a lucid commentary on contemporary philosophical views. While I strongly recommend Kim's book to anyone interested in the subject, my endorsement is not unconditional, because I cannot make the same recomendation of the subject itself. Considering arguments of Davidson, Putnam, Burge, Block, and Kim himself, I conclude that the subject turns on a variety of implausible but received arguments, and that a useful study of mental causation cannot be divorced from scientific details of cognitive psychology, physics, and neuroscience.

Type
Review Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 455 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093.

‡

I thank Daniel Wegner of the Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, for helpful discussions and references, and Patricia Churchland, Philip Kitcher, Susan Sterrett, and especially Patricia Kitcher for useful suggestions. I shamelessly borrowed a family joke about the joints from Alison Gopnik. Of course, none of them are responsible for what I have said or how I have said it.

References

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