David Lewis (philosopher)

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

Life

Lewis attended for one year the Oxford University, where he attended lectures by Gilbert Ryle, Peter Frederick Strawson and John Langshaw Austin. Especially from Ryles behaviorist position in the philosophy of mind, he was deeply impressed at that time. Later he took up the study of chemistry at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania on which, however, he gave up soon for the study of philosophy. This he continued after obtaining the bachelor's degree continued at Harvard University, where Willard Van Orman Quine should be his most important teacher. During this time he also met with Jack Smart, whose as "Australian materialism " designated position should respect the mind-body problem inspired him to later he represents identity theory of mental and neurophysiological states. In addition, Lewis showed a lifetime highly interested in thoughts of Australian philosophers. This academic interest corresponded a deep personal attachment to the Australian culture, which is likely to have, not least given him his wife Stephanie. In 1964 he received the M. A. and 1967, the Ph.D. with a thesis on language convention under the supervision of Quine. In 1966, Lewis had a position at the University of California at Los Angeles, where the young scholar was under the influence of such renowned colleagues such as Richard Montague and Rudolf Carnap. From 1970 to Lewis taught at Princeton University since 1973 as a full professor until his death. Since 1983, Lewis was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early work on conventions

Lewis first monograph was Convention: A Philosophical Study ( 1969), based on his dissertation and concepts of game theory used to analyze the nature of social conventions. With it, he won the first Franklin Matchette price of the American Philosophical Association (APA) for the best -published book in philosophy of a philosopher under 40. Lewis claimed that some social conventions are solutions for so-called " ' coordination problems '." He cites examples such as the convention that man ( on the left ) moves to the right, or that the original caller calls again when a phone call is interrupted. Coordination problems were at the time of Lewis' book very little discussed in game theory problems, most of the game-theoretical discussion went around problems in which the participants are to each other in the conflict, such as the prisoner's dilemma.

Coordination problems are problematic because, although the participants have common interests, are several solutions. Sometimes one of the solutions " ' sticking out ' ," a concept, the game theorist and economist Thomas Schelling has invented. For example, a coordination problem in which two people are to meet, have a unique solution if there were only one possible place in the city for this meeting. In most cases, however, we have to rely on something called Lewis " precedent " us. If both participants know that a particular coordination problem, for example, " On which side should we go? " was repeatedly dissolved in advance in the same way and both know that both know that both know, etc. ( this special status called Lewis " ' well known '" or in English " ' common knowledge '", he has since been much discussed of philosophers and game theorists ), then they will easily solve the problem. Others will see that these two have successfully solved the problem in which the convention is prevalent in the society further. A convention is therefore a rule of conduct that bears because they served the interests of all parties. Another important feature of a convention is that a convention could be quite different: you might as well drive on the left side of the road, it's more or less arbitrarily, that one on the right and in the UK drives on the left side, for example, in Germany.

Lewis' main aim in the book was not easy to make an agreement, but to examine the truism that language is determined by conventions. The last two chapters of the book ( Signalling Systems and Conventions of Language, see also "Languages ​​and Language ", 1975) show that the use of language in a society based on conventions of truthfulness and mutual trust of the population. Lewis arranged in this frame ideas as the truth and analyticity, claiming that they are better understood as relations between sentences and a language, rather than as properties of sentences.

Work

Lewis worked mainly in the areas of ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of logic. It is him often able to afford extraordinarily original and pioneering contributions to the discussions in these disciplines, which his oeuvre - although almost exclusively known only professional philosophers - became one of the most important points of reference in the philosophy of the present. Yet his work is to give a hand characterized by the effort between abstract and counter-intuitive to a large extent theories of philosophy and the sciences (eg quantum physics ) and the views of the nature of the world of intuitive common sense; other hand, bold and radical theses for his thinking are characteristic - such as perhaps his best known and most controversial thesis of the existence of countless worlds that are our spatiotemporally separated from the.

In addition to numerous articles in philosophical journals following writings by him have been published:

• Lewis used elements of game theory to describe linguistic conventions A Philosophical Study ( 1969): In his dissertation Convention.
• In Counterfactuals (1973 ) Lewis developed an analysis of counterfactual conditionals based on a theory of possible worlds. His realism in terms of possible worlds, Lewis worked out in On the Plurality of Worlds (1986). This allows an elegant treatment of semantic Modalaussagen: "p is necessary " is true if there is a matching truth-makers in all possible worlds; "p is impossible," if in any, "p is possible" if at least one, "p", though. aktualen in the world Some philosophers hold that realism regarding possible worlds for ontologically challenging and suggest instead, eg or similar maximum of full descriptions to speak.
• In Lewis' latest book Parts of Classes ( 1991), a reduction of set theory attempted to the 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 essays Lewis developed a reductive theory of mind, which contains elements of identity theory and functionalism.

Later life and death

Lewis suffered a major part of his life under a severe diabetes, which eventually got worse and led to kidney failure. In July 2000 he received a kidney transplant from his wife Stephanie. The transplant allowed him for another year to work and travel before he is suddenly and unexpectedly died of other complications of his diabetes on 14 October 2001.

Since his death, a series of posthumous papers were published on topics such as truth and cause of the philosophy of physics. Lewisian Themes 2004 was published a collection of essays about his philosophy.