Lewis, David

(1941– )

American philosopher. Lewis was born in Oberlin, Ohio, and educated at Swarthmore, at Oxford for a year, and at Harvard where he gained his doctorate in 1967. He taught at university of California, Los Angeles from 1966 to 1970, since when he has taught at Princeton. Lewis has contributed to a wide range of issues, and is probably the most influential contemporary metaphysician working in the analytic tradition. His first book, Convention: a Philosophical Study (1969) rehabilitated the notion of convention, at the time regarded with deep suspicion both by philosophers of language and by political theorists. Counterfactuals (1973) introduced the now classic possible worlds treatment of such statements. Lewis is remarkable for an uncompromising realism about the possible worlds in terms of which his analyses work, and much modern discussion has centred on ways of having the benefits of his accounts without incurring the metaphysical costs. Such attempts are rebuffed in The Plurality of Worlds (1986). Lewis addresses a wide variety of other issues in his Collected Papers (2 vols., 1983, 1986). His book Parts of Classes (1991) develops a mereological approach to set theory.