David Lewis (philosopher)
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. He has made contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical logic. He is probably best known for his controversial modal realist stance: that (i) possible worlds exist, (ii) every possible world is a concrete entity, (iii) any possible world is causally and spatiotemporally isolated from any other possible world, and (iv) our world is among the possible worlds. This view has a wide variety of uses in providing a framework for philosophical thought, including providing a non-modal analysis of necessity and possibility. A recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Lewis the thirteenth most important philosopher of the past 200 years, and another ranked him as the third most important philosopher of the twentieth century.
Read more about David Lewis (philosopher): Early Life and Education, Early Work On Convention, Counterfactuals and Modal Realism, Books, Later Life and Death, Selected Papers
Famous quotes containing the words david and/or lewis:
“If men will believe it, sua si bona norint, there are no more quiet Tempes, nor more poetic and Arcadian lives, than may be lived in these New England dwellings. We thought that the employment of their inhabitants by day would be to tend the flowers and herds, and at night, like the shepherds of old, to cluster and give names to the stars from the river banks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Nearing again the legendary isle
Where sirens sang and mariners were skinned,
We wonder now what was there to beguile
That such stout fellows left their bones behind.”
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