Kim studied Western philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and the Graduate School of Philosophy at Korea University and received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Bonn, Germany, where he wrote his dissertation on modern German philosophy. Since then, Kim has been a philosophy professor at his alma mater, where he has lectured on various issues in contemporary European philosophy, focusing on Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer. His main research interests are hermeneutics, scientific methodology, and ontology, and has published over 20 papers on these subjects. Kim's publications include Science and Psychiatry: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences and the Way Forward for the Psychiatric Sciences, and he has translated Wilhelm Dilthey's The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences.