Panayot Butchvarov
Encyclopedia
Panayot Butchvarov is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Career

Butchvarov left Syracuse University in 1968 as a full professor to move to the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...

, where he was at the time of his retirement in 2005 the University of Iowa Foundation Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. He was President of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division) in 1992-93, and has served as President of the Central States Philosophical Association and editor of the Journal of Philosophical Research.

Butchvarov has made major, systematic contributions to contemporary metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

, epistemology, and ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

. His books include Resemblance and Identity: An Examination of the Problem of Universals (Indiana University Press, 1966), The Concept of Knowledge (Northwestern University Press, 1970), Being Qua Being: A Theory of Identity, Existence and Predication (Indiana University Press, 1979), Skepticism in Ethics (Indiana University Press, 1989), and Skepticism about the External World (Oxford University Press, 1998). He is currently at work on a book manuscript, "Anthropocentrism in Philosophy." and.

In metaphysics, Butchvarov is perhaps best known for his work on the identity theory of universals and on the nature of informative identity statements (that is, statements of the form a=b -- as opposed to instances of the law of identity, that is, statements of the form a=a). In epistemology, he argues for the view that knowledge is the absolute impossibility of mistake. In ethics, his central metaethical
Meta-ethics
In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...

 thesis is that a realist account of goodness is defensible if goodness is seen as a generic property.

Butchvarov may be said to have been influenced by philosophers as varied as Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

, Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...

, and Wittgenstein. The latter's influence can perhaps best be seen in Butchvarov's metaphilosophical Method of Analogy for which he argued in "The Limits of Ontological Analysis" (in M. S. Gram and E. D. Klemke (eds.), The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann (University of Iowa Press, 1974)). He claims that understanding is most often a matter of coming to see what something is like, seeing what it literally is being a limiting case, and that it is the noticing, discovery, and grasping of similarities and differences that is the core intellectual achievement in our understanding of the world.

Further reading

  • Larry Lee Blackman (ed.), The Philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov: A Collegial Evaluation (Edwin Mellon Press, 2005).

External links

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