From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William G. Lycan (b. September 26, 1945, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American philosopher teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before moving to UNC Lycan taught for several years at Ohio State University. His principal interests include philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of linguistics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Lycan is an advocate of Daniel Dennett's version of functionalism, known as homuncular functionalism. He is also an outspoken critic of epistemic minimalism.

Along with Robert Adams, Lycan rejects David Kellogg Lewis's notion of possible worlds as metaphysically extravagant, and suggests in its place an actualist interpretation of possible worlds as consistent, maximally complete sets of descriptions of or propositions about the world, so that a "possible world" is conceived of as a complete description (i.e. a set of consistent, maximal set of propositions) of a way the world could be – rather than a world which is that way.

William Lycan received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1966 while working as a teaching assistant in the Music department. His honors thesis was on "Noam Chomsky's Investigation of Syntax." He went on to receive his M.A. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1970, both from the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation was on "Persons, Criteria, and Materialism."

• Logical Form in Natural Language (Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1984), xii + 348 pp.
• Knowing Who (with Steven Boër) (Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1986), xiv + 212 pp.
• Consciousness (Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1987), ix + 165 pp.
• Judgement and Justification (Cambridge University Press, 1988), xiii + 230 pp.
• Modality and Meaning (Kluwer Academic Publishing, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy series, 1994), xxii + 335 pp.
• Consciousness and Experience (Bradford Books / MIT Press, 1996), xx + 211 pp.
• Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge Publishers, 1999), xvi + 243 pp.
• Real Conditionals (Oxford University Press, 2001), vii + 223 pp.

• Staff Homepage at UNC
• William G. Lycan's Curriculum Vitae