David Lewis

1941-2001 · American · Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science

There are many other ways that a world might be; and one of these many ways is the way that this world is.

When David Lewis published On the Plurality of Worlds in 1986, most philosophers greeted it with what he cheerfully called the incredulous stare. His claim: the other possible worlds are just as real and concrete as this one, populated by their own stars, people, and quarks, causally sealed off from us. Lewis meant it literally, and defended it not by arguing it was intuitive but by arguing it was worth the price.

Topics David Lewis addresses

• modal realism
• counterpart theory
• the incredulous stare
• Humean supervenience
• the Humean mosaic
• perfectly natural properties
• the abundant/sparse distinction
• the Best System Analysis of laws
• the counterfactual analysis of causation
• counterfactual dependence
• causation as influence
• small miracles and quasi-miracles
• the Principal Principle
• finkish dispositions
• mad pain and Martian pain
• analytic functionalism
• realizer functionalism
• the Lewis-Nemirow ability hypothesis
• convention as game-theoretic coordination
• common knowledge
• truthfulness and trust in L
• the rule of accommodation
• scorekeeping in a language game
• epistemic contextualism

Converse with David Lewis on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in David Lewis's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.