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Касталия/Kastalia
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ПАНАЙОТ БЪЧВАРОВ
За себе си
I was born on April 2, 1933, in Sofia, Bulgaria. My father was a lawyer, eventually working for the Bulgarian equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service. My mother was a pianist, unfortunately stricken with arthritis of the fingers when still in her forties.
In 1949, I escaped from Bulgaria, rowing, together with two Gymnasium classmates, a small boat across a part of the Black Sea to the Turkish shore. At the time, I was confident that my motivation was entirely political, but now I believe that much of it was a 16 years-old boy’s desire for adventure. Nevertheless, when 15, I read in a Marxist history of philosophy about the “decadent subjective idealism” of Hume, and rushed to the National Library to read Hume’s Treatise. I was told that I needed special permission, which promptly was refused. Soon after, in Turkey, I was able to purchase my own copy of the Treatise. I had felt the stirrings of philosophical interest, however, long before reading that history of philosophy. In 1944, I found myself writing a couple of pages on “the meaning of life,” reaching the unremarkable conclusion that it consisted in “happiness.” And later, as a gymnasium student, I read various Marxist writings and found them convincing—until my encounter with Hume.
After a month in a provincial Turkish jail, interrogated by intelligence officers who thought I might be a communist spy, I enrolled, on scholarships, in the French lycée in Istanbul, though after a semester I transferred to Robert College, an American college with a faculty mostly from Great Britain and the United States. I majored in philosophy, studying mainly with students of H. H. Price and Gilbert Ryle. I wrote a B.A. thesis relating Hume’s theory of the self and Ryle’s discussion of its elusiveness; the gist of the thesis was later published in The Philosophical Quarterly.
Upon graduation in 1952, I came to the United States to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Virginia. In the summer of 1953 I took a graduate course in the philosophy of science at Cornell University, was offered adequate financial aid, but chose to return to Virginia. My M.A. degree was awarded there in 1953, with a thesis on Hume’s theory of the self. I received the Ph.D. in 1955. The topic of my dissertation was the existence of relations; a part of it appeared in 1957 in the Review of Metaphysics. To my teachers at Virginia I owe my enormous respect for Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes, Hume and Kant, Sartre and Wittgenstein. I am not a historian of philosophy, but I believe that in philosophy often there is far more to be learned from the past than from the present. The past of philosophy is not like the past of physics. It is more like the past of literature, though of course philosophy is not literature.
I married Suzanna Graham in 1955. We have two children, Vanya Kallaus and Christopher Butchvarov, and two grandchildren, David and Catherine Kallaus.
My subsequent activities are adequately listed in my curriculum vitae. I doubt that I have done anything else that might be worth listing. Perhaps the only exception might be my association in the middle fifties with the Bulgarian National Committee, which was led by G.M. Dimitrov. He put me in charge of the Youth Section of the committee.
As an involved observer of Anglo-American philosophy since the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, I have mostly enjoyed, often with amusement, but sometimes dismay, the merry-go-round of philosophical focus: from private languages to the analytic-synthetic distinction to neurophilosophy. Perhaps the busy-ness of philosophy during those fifty six years is due to its growing “professionalization,” its having become a learned way of making a living, like law and medicine. Concerns over finding a job, getting published, even appearing on a program have tended to become central and to lead, understandably and almost irresistibly, to preoccupation with whatever happens to be the current fashion. Something like this perhaps has always been the true, in ancient Athens as well as in the medieval monasteries, but it began to be common when the German philosophers sought employment as state employees, and it blossomed in the United States when higher education became a sort of industry. 26th August 2006 |