David Kellogg Lewis

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David Kellogg Lewis (born September 28, 1941 in Oberlin , Ohio , † October 14, 2001 in Princeton , New Jersey ) was an American philosopher who made influential contributions to several areas of the practical and the in the second half of the 20th century theoretical philosophy.

Life

Lewis attended Oxford University for a year , where he attended lectures by Gilbert Ryle , Peter Frederick Strawson and John Langshaw Austin . He was particularly impressed at this time by Ryle's behaviorist position in the philosophy of mind . He later took on the study of chemistry at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, which he soon gave up for the study of philosophy. He continued this after obtaining his bachelor's degree at Harvard University , where Willard Van Orman Quine should be perhaps his most important teacher. During this time he also met Jack Smart , whose position known as "Australian materialism" on the mind-body problem was to inspire him to the identity theory of mental and neurophysiological states that he later advocated. In addition, Lewis was very interested in the thoughts of Australian philosophers throughout his life. This academic interest corresponded with a deep private connection to Australian culture, which his wife Stephanie should have conveyed to him not least. In 1964 he received his MA and in 1967 his Ph.D. with a thesis on language convention under the supervision of Quines. From 1966 Lewis had a job at the University of California, Los Angeles , where the young scholar was under the influence of such well-known colleagues as Richard Montague and Rudolf Carnap . From 1970 on, Lewis taught at Princeton University , from 1973 as a full professor, until his death. Lewis was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1983 . In 1992 he was elected a corresponding member of the British Academy .

Early work on conventions

Lewis' first monograph was Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969), which is based on his dissertation and uses game theory concepts to analyze the nature of social conventions. With her he won the American Philosophical Association's (APA) first Franklin Matchette Prize for the best published book in philosophy by a philosopher under 40. Lewis claimed that some social conventions are solutions to so-called "coordination problems". He gives examples such as the convention that you drive on the right side (not the left side) or that the original caller calls again if a phone call is interrupted. Coordination problems were very little discussed game theory problems at the time of Lewis' book; most of the game theory discussions centered around problems in which the participants are in conflict with one another, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma .

Coordination problems are problematic because, although the participants have common interests, there are several solutions. Sometimes one of the solutions can “stand out”, a concept invented by game theorist and economist Thomas Schelling . For example, a coordination problem where two people are supposed to meet can have an excellent solution if there was only one possible place in town for that meeting. In most cases, however, we have to rely on what Lewis calls "precedent." If both participants know that a certain coordination problem, for example “Which side of the road should we drive on?” Has been solved several times in the same way and both know that both know that both know etc. (Lewis calls this particular status “general known "or in English" common knowledge ", it has been discussed a lot by philosophers and game theorists since then), then they will solve the problem very easily. Others will see that these two have successfully solved the problem, thereby spreading the convention more widely in society. A convention is therefore a rule of conduct that works because it serves the interests of all parties involved. Another important characteristic of a convention is that a convention could be very different: you might as well be driving on the left-hand side of the road; that is, it is more or less arbitrary to drive on the left in Great Britain and many former colonies, for example, and on the right in the rest of the world.

Lewis' main aim in the book, however, was not simply to form a convention, but to examine the truism that language is determined by convention. The last two chapters of the book ( Signaling Systems and Conventions of Language ; see also "Languages ​​and Language", 1975) show that the use of language in a society is based on conventions of truthfulness and mutual trust among the population. Lewis arranges ideas such as truth and analyticity in this context, claiming that they are better understood as relationships between sentences and a language, rather than as properties of sentences.

plant

Lewis worked mainly in the fields of ontology , philosophy of mind , philosophy of language , epistemology , metaphysics and philosophy of logic . In doing so, he has often succeeded in making extraordinarily original and trend-setting contributions to the discussions in these disciplines, which has made his oeuvre - although almost exclusively known only to specialist philosophers - one of the most important reference points in contemporary philosophy. His work is characterized on the one hand by the effort to mediate between abstract and, to a large extent, counter-intuitive theories of philosophy and science (such as quantum physics ) and the conceptions of the nature of the world of intuitive everyday understanding; on the other hand, bold and radical theses are characteristic of his thinking - for example his perhaps best-known and most controversial thesis on the existence of countless worlds that are spatially separated from ours.

In addition to numerous articles in philosophical journals, the following works have been published by him:

  • In his dissertation Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969), Lewis used elements of game theory to describe linguistic conventions.
  • In Counterfactuals (1973), Lewis developed an analysis of counterfactual conditional clauses based on a theory of possible worlds . Lewis worked out his realism in relation to possible worlds in On the Plurality of Worlds (1986). This allows an elegant semantic treatment of modal statements: “p is necessary” is true if a suitable truth maker exists in all possible worlds; “P is impossible” if in none, “p is possible” if in at least one, “p” if in the actual world. A number of philosophers consider this realism with regard to possible worlds to be ontologically too demanding and suggest, instead, e.g. B. to speak of maximally complete descriptions or the like.
  • Lewis' last book Parts of Classes (1991) attempts to reduce set theory to mereology . Other important ontological theses can be found in Lewis' essay "New Work for a Theory of Universals", in which the existence of universals is defended.
  • In a series of papers, Lewis developed a reductive theory of mind that incorporates elements of identity theory and functionalism .

Later life and death

Lewis suffered much of his life from severe diabetes mellitus , which eventually led to kidney failure . In July 2000, he received a kidney transplant from his wife, Stephanie. He was then able to work and travel for another year before he suddenly and unexpectedly died of further complications on October 14, 2001.

A number of posthumous papers have been published since his death on subjects such as "Truth" and "Cause of the Philosophy of Physics". In 2004 Lewisian Themes , a collection of essays on his philosophy, was published.

See also

literature

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Primary literature

  • Convention: A Philosophical Study 1969, Harvard UP (German 1975: Conventions, a treatise on the philosophy of language, translated by Roland Posner , Berlin: de Gruyter)
  • Counterfactuals 1973, Blackwell & Harvard UP
  • Semantic Analysis: Essays Dedicated to Stig Kanger on His Fiftieth Birthday 1974, Reidel
  • On the Plurality of Worlds 1986, Blackwell
  • Parts of Classes 1991, Blackwell

Lewis published five volumes of 99 articles - almost all of the texts he published during his lifetime. In these he presented and defended his counterfactual theory of causality , the concept of semantic value, a contextualistic analysis of knowledge, a dispositional theory of value and more.

  • Philosophical Papers Volume I 1983, Oxford UP
  • Philosophical Papers Volume II 1986, Oxford UP
  • The Identity of Mind and Body , ed. and over. by Andreas Kemmerling, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 978-3-465-01856-8
  • Materialism and Consciousness , ed. and over. by Ulrike Haas-Spohn and Wolfgang Spohn, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-465-04031-6

Secondary literature

  • Uwe Meixner : David Lewis. Paderborn: Mentis, 2006. ISBN 3-89785-501-1
  • Daniel Nolan: David Lewis , Chesham: Acumen Publishing 2005.
  • Wolfgang Schwarz: David Lewis : Metaphysics and Analysis, Paderborn: Mentis-Verlag 2009.

Selected publications

  • "Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic." Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): pp. 113-126.
  • "General semantics." Synthesis , 22 (1) (1970): pp. 18-67.
  • "Truth in Fiction." American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): pp. 37-46.
  • "How to Define Theoretical Terms." Journal of Philosophy 67 (1979): pp. 427-46.
  • "Scorekeeping in a Language Game." Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979): pp. 339-59.
  • "Mad pain and Martian pain." Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology Vol. IN Block, ed. Harvard University Press (1980): pp. 216-222.
  • "Are We Free to Break the Laws?" Theoria (Philosophy Journal) 47 (1981): pp. 113-21.
  • “New Work for a Theory of Universals.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983): pp. 343-77. ( online ; PDF; 5.6 MB)
  • "Elusive Knowledge", Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 74/4 (1996): pp. 549-567.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 29, 2020 .
  2. ↑ See e.g. B. the brief overview in Weatherson 2009 , Berto 2009 and the selected bibliography in philpapers.
personal data
SURNAME Lewis, David Kellogg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH September 28, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberlin , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 2001
Place of death Princeton , New Jersey