Kilwardby Robert (d.1279), English philosopher and theologian. He apparently studied and perhaps taught at the University of Paris, later joining the Dominicans and perhaps lecturing at Oxford. He became archbishop of Canterbury in 1272 and in 1277 condemned thirty propositions, among them Aquinas’s position that there is a single substantial form in a human being. Kilwardby resigned his archbishopric in 1278 and was appointed to the bishopric of Santa Rufina in Italy, where he died. Kilwardby wrote extensively and had considerable medieval influence, especially in philosophy of language; but it is now unusually difficult to determine which works are authentically his. De Ortu Scientiarum advanced a sophisticated account of how names are imposed and a detailed account of the nature and role of logic. In metaphysics he insisted that things are individual and that universality arises from operations of the soul. He wrote extensively on happiness and was concerned to show that some happiness is possible in this life. In psychology he argued that freedom of decision is a disposition arising from the cooperation of the intellect and the will. C.G.Norm. Kim, Jaegwon (b.1934), Korean-American philosopher, writing in the analytic tradition, author of important works in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.
Kim has defended a ‘fine-grained’ conception of events according to which an event is the possessing of a property by an object at a time (see ‘Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event,’ 1973; this and other papers referred to here are collected in Supervenience and Mind, 1993). This view has been a prominent rival of the ‘coarse-grained’ account of events associated with Davidson.
Kim’s work on the concept of supervenience has been widely influential, especially in the philosophy of mind (see ‘Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept,’ 1990). He regards supervenience (or, as he now prefers, ‘property covariation’) as a relation holding between property families (mental properties and physical properties, for instance). If A-properties supervene on B-properties, then, necessarily, for any A-property, a, if an object, o, has a, there is some B-property, b, such that o has b, and (necessarily) anything that has b has a. Stronger or weaker versions of supervenience result from varying the modal strength of the parenthetical ‘necessarily’, or omitting it entirely.
Although the notion of supervenience has been embraced by philosophers who favor some form of ‘non-reductive physicalism’ (the view that the mental depends on, but is not reducible to, the physical), Kim himself has expressed doubts that physicalism can avoid reduction (‘The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism,’ 1989). If mental properties supervene on, but are distinct from, physical properties, then it is hard to see how mental properties could have a part in the production of physical effects – or mental effects, given the dependence of the mental on the physical.
More recently, Kim has developed an account of ‘functional reduction’ according to which supervenient properties are causally efficacious if and only if they are functionally reducible to properties antecedently accepted as causally efficacious (Mind in a Physical World, 1998). Properties, including properties of conscious experiences, not so reducible are ‘epiphenomenal.’ See also DAVIDSON, EVENT, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND , REDUCTION , SUPERVENIENC. J.F.H.