David Lewis Nolan, Daniel Patrick
2005., 2005, 20150130, 2015-01-30, 2005-01-30
eBook
David Lewis's work is of fundamental importance in many areas of philosophical inquiry and there are few areas of Anglo-American philosophy where his impact has not been felt. Lewis's philosophy also ...has a rare unity: his views form a comprehensive philosophical system, answering a broad range of questions in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of action and many other areas. This breadth of Lewis's work, however, has meant that it is difficult to know where to start in Lewis's work and a casual reader may often miss some of the illuminating connections between apparently quite disparate pieces of Lewis's work. This book aims to make this body of work more accessible to a general philosophical readership, while also providing a unified overview of the many contributions Lewis has made to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The book can be divided into four parts. The first part examines Lewis's metaphysical picture - one of the areas where he has had the greatest impact and also the framework for the rest of his theories. The second section discusses Lewis's important contributions in the philosophy of mind, language and meaning. The third part explores some of Lewis's work in decision theory, metaethics and applied ethics, areas where his work in not necessarily as widely appreciated, but in which he has done a range of work that is both accessible and important. The final section focuses on Lewis's distinctive philosophical method, perhaps one of his most significant legacies, which combines naturalism with "common-sense" theorizing.
In A Companion to David Lewis, Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer bring together top philosophers to explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's seminal work in original ways. Students and ...scholars will discover the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through the diverse range of his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. * The first and only comprehensive study of the work of David Lewis, one of the most systematic and influential philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century * Contributions shed light on the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through Lewis's work across his enormous range of influence, including metaphysics, language, logic, epistemology, science, mind, ethics, and aesthetics * Outstanding Lewis scholars and leading philosophers working in the fields Lewis influenced explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's work in original ways * An essential resource for students and researchers across analytic philosophy that covers the major themes of Lewis's work
Radical Misinterpretation Elliott, Edward
Pacific philosophical quarterly,
September 2023, 2023-09-00, 20230901, Letnik:
104, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper provides an exposition and defence of Lewis' theory of radical interpretation. The first part of the paper explains what Lewis' theory was; the second part explains what it wasn't, and in ...so doing addresses a number of common objections that arise as a result of widespread myths and misunderstandings about how Lewis' theory is supposed to work.
The paper argues that Lewis’ Genuine Modal Realism, in taking the plurality of worlds to be
necessarily
the way it is, implies the existence of necessary connections of the sort that contradicts the ...Humean thesis that Lewis endorses. By endorsing, pace Divers, a non-redundancy interpretation of advanced modalizing, we gain the means to exactly state what these connections amount to.
We propose a novel interpretation of Lewis on the analysis of modality that is constructed from primary sources, comprehensive and unprecedented (in toto). Our guiding precepts are to distinguish ...semantics from metaphysics, while respecting the inter-relations between them, and to discern whatever may be special, semantically or metaphysically, about the modal case. Following detailed presentation (Sect.
2
), we amplify and advocate our interpretation by providing a conforming genealogy of Lewis’s theory of modality (Sect.
3
) and applying it to construct a detailed and newly illuminating version of the Lewisian theory of modality de re (Sect.
4
).
Abstract
How important are ambassadors in international politics? While a growing body of research stresses the importance of diplomacy in international politics, it remains unclear if individual ...ambassadors make a significant difference or what attributes make for an effective ambassador. This paper explores these questions through a systematic analysis of 2,730 US ambassadors between 1946 and 2014. The United States is distinctive in that it sends a sizable number of noncareer political appointees to serve as ambassadors. This provides a unique opportunity to examine how an ambassador's experience shapes where they are placed and how they perform. Using various techniques to address selection effects, including matching, I find that the United States is less likely to experience a militarized dispute with a host nation when it is represented by a political ambassador. Moreover, political ambassadors with professional experience in politics or the military, those who are close to the president, and those who are appointed in permissive congressional environments are less likely to experience militarized disputes during their tenure. Individual ambassadors matter, but diplomatic experience alone is not the only attribute that makes for an effective ambassador.
Commenting David Hume’s metaphor of the “wall” of benevolence and the “vault” of justice in the third Appendix of his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, the paper compares those two “social ...virtues”, and thus describes two forms of social links, corresponding respectively to the “natural virtue” of benevolence and to the “artificial virtue” of justice. I also examine Hume’s enhancing of the possible contradictions between those two virtues, when he remarks that some isolated acts of justice, though absolutely necessary to the cohesion of the “vault” of justice, actually constitute a “form of evil”; an observation that other authors such as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and John Rawls, have somehow neglected.
Direct inferences identify certain probabilistic credences or confirmation-function-likelihoods with values of objective chances or relative frequencies. The best known version of a direct inference ...principle is David Lewis’s
Principal Principle
. Certain kinds of statements undermine direct inferences. Lewis calls such statements
inadmissible
. We show that on any Bayesian account of direct inference several kinds of intuitively innocent statements turn out to be inadmissible. This may pose a significant challenge to Bayesian accounts of direct inference. We suggest some ways in which these challenges may be addressed.
In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game ...introduced by Lewis (Convention 1969). We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise—when there are more than two states for actors to transfer meaning about and when some states are more likely than others. In these cases, we find that actors are less likely to arrive at strategies where signals have clear conventional meaning. We conclude with a proposal for extending the use of the methodology of experimental economics in experimental philosophy.
The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic account of the metaphysically important distinction between haecceitistic properties, such as being David Lewis or being acquainted with David Lewis, ...and qualitative properties, such as being red or being acquainted with a famous philosopher. I first argue that this distinction is hyperintensional, that is, that cointensional properties can differ in whether they are qualitative. Then I develop an analysis of the qualitative/haecceitistic distinction according to which haecceitistic properties are relational in a certain sense. I argue that this analysis can capture the hyperintensionality of the qualitative/haecceitistic distinction and is generally in accordance with the use of the notion of a qualitative property in philosophical debates.
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