William Lycan

Who is William Lycan?

William G. Lycan is an American philosopher teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor. He won the Class of 2001 Outstanding Faculty Award and a Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction in 2002. Before moving to UNC in 1982, Lycan taught for twelve years at Ohio State University. As of 2011, Lycan has a co-appointment at the University of Connecticut.

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 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, epistemic justification, linguistic meaning, perception, moral properties, aesthetic properties, and more.