Description

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David Lewis (1941-2001) was a celebrated and influential figure in analytic philosophy. When Lewis died, he left behind a large body of unpublished notes, manuscripts, and letters. This volume contains two longer manuscripts which Lewis had originally intended to turn into books, and thirty-one shorter items. The longer manuscripts are 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel', his David Gavin Young Lectures at the University of Adelaide, and 'Confirmation Theory', which is based on a graduate course on probability and logic that he gave at UCLA. Lewis's described his purposes in 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel' as being, (1) to solve a philosophical problem hitherto largely ignored or casually mis-solved by philosophers ...]; (2) to introduce the layman to various topics in metaphysics, since our problem turns out to connect with many more familiar ones; and (3) to show of several of my favorite doctrines and methods in metaphysics'. By contrast, 'Confirmation Theory' is a technical work in which Lewis aimed to present in a unified fashion what he considered to be the best from competing theories of confirmation. Lewis described the work as 'Mathematically self-contained, with proofs for the major theorems; but the mathematics is kept down to hairy high-school algebra'. The thirty-one shorter items cover such topics as causation, freedom of the will, probability, counterparts, reference, logic, value, and divine evil. They are included here both for their intrinsic philosophical interest and their historical value. This volume also contains an intellectual biography of the young David Lewis by the editors.

About the Author

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David Lewis, Late Class of 1943 University Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University Frederique Janssen-Lauret is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester, specialising in philosophical logic and history of analytic philosophy. She was previously a research fellow on the AHRC-funded project 'The Age of Metaphysical Revolution: David Lewis and His Place in the History of Analytic Philosophy'. She is co-translator of Quine's The Significance of the New Logic (Cambridge University Press 2018) and has published papers on philosophical logic, Lewis, Quine, and Stebbing in Synthese, The Monist, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, and in volumes published by Oxford, Cambridge, and Palgrave. Fraser MacBride is currently Chair of Logic & Metaphysics at the University of Manchester. He was previously the Chair of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University and held a Readership at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of On the Genealogy of Universal: The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy (OUP) and was awarded a Leverhulme Prize for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics. He was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project 'The Age of Metaphysical Revolution: David Lewis and His Place in the History of Analytic Philosophy' and has published papers on Lewis's relationship to Armstrong, Quine, and Carnap.