The Age of Metaphysical Revolution

David Lewis and his place in the history of Analytic Philosophy

Letter of the month, July 2018

by | Jul 10, 2018 | Letter of the Month

Lewis’s recipient – John Coker – was a student of Alvin Plantinga at Notre Dame in the 1980s. Coker wrote a paper arguing that modal realism, with Lewis’s added trappings of concrete worlds, no overlap, qualified principle of recombination, etc, is...

Letter of the month, June 2018

by | Jun 19, 2018 | Letter of the Month

In this letter, Lewis provides comments on a draft of Colin McGinn’s 1980 Functionalism and Phenomenalism: A Critical Note. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (March):35-46. This letter is important for understanding Lewis’s theory of mind but also for...
Letter of the Month, June 2017

Letter of the Month, June 2017

by | Jun 30, 2017 | Letter of the Month

June’s letter of the month concerns various connections between modal logic and ordinary language. Does modal logic have its own source of intuitions? Is modal logic or ‘modal language’ as philosophers conceive of it a thing of its own? What is it exactly? In this...

Letter of the month, May 2017

by | May 31, 2017 | Letter of the Month

Soon after the publication of David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds it received reviews in many journals by leading philosophers. In this letter Lewis replies to Philip P. Hanson’s 1986 review from Philosophy in Review, vol. 6, pp. 498-500. Lewis reacts...
Letter of the month, March 2017

Letter of the month, March 2017

by | Mar 31, 2017 | Letter of the Month

David Lewis famously proposed that counterpart theory can substitute quantified modal logic. He argued that instead of formalising modal discourse using modal operators we can stick with first-order predicate logic with identity so long as we introduce talk of...