David Lewis (philosopher)

David Kellogg Lewis
Born	September 28, 1941 Oberlin, Ohio
Died	October 14, 2001 (aged 60) Princeton, New Jersey
Alma mater	Swarthmore College Oxford University Harvard University
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Logic · Language · Metaphysics Epistemology · Ethics
Notable ideas	Possible worlds · Modal realism · Principal principle · Humean supervenience · Lewis's Generalization
Influences Leibniz · Hume · Carnap · Ryle Quine · Thomas Schelling · Strawson · Smart
Influenced Bob Brandom, David Velleman, Peter Railton, Daniel Nolan, John Hawthorne, Barry Loewer, Ted Sider, L.A. Paul, Dean Zimmerman

David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. He made contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, and aesthetics. He is probably best known for his controversial modal realist stance: that (i) possible worlds exist, (ii) every possible world is a concrete entity, (iii) any possible world is causally and spatiotemporally isolated from any other possible world, and (iv) our world is among the possible worlds.

Lewis was born in Oberlin, Ohio, to John D. Lewis, a Professor of Government at Oberlin College, and Ruth Ewart Kelloggs Lewis, a distinguished medieval historian. The formidable intellect for which he was known later in his life was already manifest during his years at Oberlin High School, when he attended college lectures in chemistry. He went on to Swarthmore College and spent a year at Oxford University (1959–1960), where he was tutored by Iris Murdoch and attended lectures by Gilbert Ryle, H.P. Grice, P.F. Strawson, and J.L. Austin. It was his year at Oxford that played a seminal role in his decision to study philosophy, and which made him the quintessentially analytic philosopher that he would soon become. Lewis went on to receive his Ph.D from Harvard in 1967, where he studied under W.V.O. Quine, many of whose views he came to repudiate. It was there that his connection with Australia was first established when he took a seminar with J.J.C. Smart, a leading Australian philosopher. "I taught David Lewis," Smart would say in later years, "Or rather, he taught me."