Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

David Lewis 52
1 Lewis’s Life and Influence
As we’ve already seen, part of Lewis’s significance came from the breadth of subject
matter on which he made major contributions. It is hard to think of a philosopher
since Hume who has contributed so much to so many fields. And in all of these cases,
Lewis’s contributions involved defending, or in many cases articulating, a big picture
theory of the subject matter, as well as an account of how the details worked. Because
of all his work on the details of various subjects, his writings were a font of ideas even
for those who didn’t agree with the bigger picture. And he was almost invariably
clear about which details were relevant only to his particular big picture, and which
were relevant to anyone who worked on the subject.
Lewis was born in Oberlin, Ohio in 1941, to two academics. He was an undergraduate
at Swarthmore College. During his undergraduate years, his interest in
philosophy was stimulated by a year abroad in Oxford, where he heard J. L. Austin’s
final series of lectures, and was tutored by Iris Murdoch. He returned to Swarthmore
as a philosophy major, and never looked back. He studied at Harvard for his Ph.D.,
writing a dissertation under the supervision of W. V. O. Quine that became his first
book, Convention. In 1966 he was hired at UCLA, where he worked until 1970,
when he moved to Princeton. He remained at Princeton until his death in 2001.
While at Harvard he met his wife Stephanie. They remained married throughout
Lewis’s life, jointly attended numerous conferences, and co-authored three papers.
Lewis visited Australia in 1971, 1975, every year from 1979 to 1999, and again shortly
before his death in 2001.
Lewis was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding
Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities. He received honorary doctorates from the University
of Melbourne, the University of York in England, and Cambridge University. His
Erd os number was 3.
Lewis published four books: Convention (1969a), Counterfactuals (1973b), On the
Plurality of Worlds (1986b) and Parts of Classes (1991). His numerous papers have been
largely collected in five volumes: Philosophical Papers Vol. I (1983d), Philosophical Papers
Vol. II (1986c), Papers in Philosophical Logic (1998), Papers in Metaphysics and
Epistemology (1999a) and Papers in Social Philosophy (2000). This entry starts with a
discussion of Lewis’s first two books, then looks at his contributions to philosophy
of mind. Sections 5 and 6 are on his metaphysics, looking in turn at Humean Supervenience
and modal realism. Section 7 looks very briefly at some of the many works
that aren’t been covered in the previous five categories.
2 Convention
David Lewis’s first book was Convention (1969a, note that all citations are to works
by David Lewis, unless explicitly stated otherwise). It was based on his Harvard Ph.