David Lewis (philosopher)
David Lewis (philosopher)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 - October 14, 2001)
is considered by many to have been the leading Analytic
philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century. Born in the
United States of America, he taught there (at UCLA and then Princeton) for his career but is also closely associated
with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more
than thirty years. He is most famous for his theory of modal realism but also made ground-breaking contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, general metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical logic.
Lewis’s most important works include Convention (1969), which used concepts of game theory to analyze the nature of linguistic conventions; Counterfactuals (1973), which
astonished the philosophical world with a ground-breaking analysis of counterfactual conditionals in terms of the theory of
possible worlds; and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986),
which fleshed out and defended the theory of modal realism which he had advanced in Counterfactuals.