Philosophical Papers, Volume II

by David Kellogg Lewis

This is the second volume of philosophical essays by one of the most innovative and influential philosophers now writing in English. Containing thirteen papers in all, the book includes both new essays and previously published papers, some of them with extensive new postscripts reflecting Lewis's current thinking. The papers in Volume II focus on causation and several other closely related topics, including counterfactual and indicative conditionals, the direction of time, subjective and objective probability, causation, explanation, perception, free will, and rational decision. Throughout, Lewis analyzes global features of the world in such a way as to show that they might turn out to supervene on the spatiotemporal arrangement of local qualities.

Genres: Philosophy

384 pages, Paperback

Published March 26, 1987

About the author

David Kellogg Lewis was a 20th century philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. He has made ground-breaking contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical logic. He is probably best known for his controversial modal realist stance: that there exist infinitely many concretely existing and causally isolated parallel universes, of which ours is just one, and which play the role of possible worlds in the analysis of necessity and possibility.

-wikipedia

Reviews

[chawon · Rating 5 out of 5]

So deeply humbling. A question that has plagued me for about a decade, regarding persistence through time, I found so elegantly nestled within Lewis' text. When I read the line "nothing endures identically through time" (persistence through time taken as being compatible with Humean Supervenience ), my world came to a halt. I don't know that I align with Sider's idea that "all the world is a stage" completely, (we know Lewis wouldn't, but I don't believe that I am mature enough in my thinking to do anything other than be agnostic here), but I know there was a me before Lewis and me post-Lewis. I have found such profound personal (and almost aesthetic? In meaning, rather than prose, if that makes any sense) treasures (so far, based on my limited reading) in Lewis and Kant. I am sure that I have not grasped Lewis' ideas in their entirety and will have to come back to them. It's also odd to think of my emotional response to a philosophical text. Anyway. I am so grateful.