David Lewis (philosopher) - Books

Books

• Convention: A Philosophical Study, Harvard University Press 1969.
• Counterfactuals, Harvard University Press 1973; revised printing Blackwell 1986.
• Semantic Analysis: Essays Dedicated to Stig Kanger on His Fiftieth Birthday, Reidel 1974.
• On the Plurality of Worlds, Blackwell 1986.
• Parts of Classes, Blackwell 1991.

Lewis published five volumes containing 99 papers - almost all of the papers he published during his lifetime. These papers discuss his counterfactual theory of causation, the concept of semantic score, a contextualist analysis of knowledge, a dispositional theory of value, among many other topics.

• Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (1983) includes his early work on counterpart theory, and the philosophy of language and of mind;
• Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (1986) includes his work on counterfactuals, causation, and decision theory, where he promotes his Principal Principle about rational belief. Its preface discusses "Humean Supervenience," the name Lewis gave to his overarching philosophical project;
• Papers in Philosophical Logic (1998);
• Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (1999) contains "Elusive Knowledge" and "Naming the Colours," honored by being reprinted in the Philosopher's Annual for the year they were first published;
• Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy (2000).

Lewis's last monograph, Parts of Classes (1991), on the foundations of mathematics, sketched a reduction of set theory and Peano arithmetic to mereology and plural quantification. Very soon after its publication, Lewis became dissatisfied with some aspects of its argument; it is currently out of print (his paper "Mathematics in megethology," in "Papers in Philosophical Logic," is partly a summary and partly a revision of "Parts of Classes").