David Kellogg Lewis
1941–2001 · Analytic Metaphysics · Prominent
David Lewis was an American philosopher of the analytic school. He held that saying a thing could have gone otherwise is talking about another world, one as solid and real as this one, cut off from us in space and time with no road running from here to there. He read causes through what would have happened without them, and laws of nature as the tidiest summary of everything that ever happens.
Signature
The position David Lewis is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Nature of Reality
- strongly leans Multiplicity
- Beginning of Things
- Eternal Cosmos / Multiverse
Positions on the 9 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic (3 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- strongly leans Brain Only (4 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Universals
- mildly leans Realism (31 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- leans Changing (72 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Constructed (7 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature of Reality
- strongly leans Multiplicity (94 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (11 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (86 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (25 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
11 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or David Lewis refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Good and Evil
- Personal Judgment
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Knowledge
- Naturalism
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Compatibilism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal Cosmos / Multiverse
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Block Universe
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Conventional
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Paradox as Error
What is the status of paradox? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal
What is human nature?