William Lycan

William G. Lycan (ˈlaɪkən ; born September 26, 1945) is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was formerly the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor. Since 2011, Lycan is also distinguished visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he continues to research, teach, and advise graduate students. William Lycan received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1966, where he also worked as a teaching assistant in the Music department. His honors thesis was on "Noam Chomsky's Investigation of Syntax." He went on to attend graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1970. His doctoral dissertation was on "Persons, Criteria, and Materialism." Lycan taught for twelve years at Ohio State University, before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1982, where he is now emeritus. He won the Class of 2001 Outstanding Faculty Award (in 2001) and a Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction in 2002. In 2013, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His principal interests include philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of linguistics, epistemology, and metaphysics. The author of eight books and over 150 articles (and over 20 reviews) Lycan is an advocate of the version of functionalism, known as homuncular functionalism. Lycan is an unapologetic realist and physicalist about almost everything – mental states (intentionality and consciousness), epistemic justification, linguistic meaning, perception (especially color and smell), moral properties, aesthetic properties, and more. This philosophical tapestry is held together by several common threads, which among others include: the view that persons are complex systems composed of sub-personal systems, sub-sub-personal systems, etc.