Letter of the month
David Lewis’s typewriter.
The Letter of the month series ran from November 2016 to May 2019.
Scroll the entries below to see the wide variety of letters that we posted throughout the course of the project. You’ll be able to see the original letter along with some scene-setting and discussion of some of the issues it raises.
Many of these letters are now published in the two-volume Philosophical Letters of David K. Lewis.
Letter of the month, May 2017
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 to the...
Letter of the month, April 2017
April’s letter of the month, to Theodore Ziolkowski in May 1983, sees Lewis apparently comparing philosophy unfavourably with science. His starting point is an article in the Syracuse Scholar, ‘Pseudoscience’, by C.L. Hardin. (You can read the article here:...
Letter of the month, March 2017
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...
Letter of the Month, February 2017
This letter to Davidson was written as Lewis was making significant strides away from the influence of Quine and beginning to wonder whether there really might be systematic and deep indeterminacy of thought and language, as Quine had claimed. By the time of “Radical...
Letter of the Month, January 2017
David Lewis is notoriously known for believing in the existence of concrete possible worlds equally real as our own. It came to be known as (genuine) modal realism. His systematic presentation and defence of the view appeared in On the Plurality of Worlds (Blackwell,...
Letter of the Month, December 2016
At the core of David Lewis' philosophical outlook is the doctrine of Humean supervenience. According to this doctrine, as he says in the Introduction to Philosophical Papers II, 'all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one...
Letter of the month, November 2016
David Lewis is well-known for defending a certain version of the identity theory of mind. According to this theory, every mental state is identical with some physical state of the brain. Lewis understood the identity theory of mind along functionalist lines. Mental...
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