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David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia , whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
A number of philosophers, including Lewis himself, have produced criticisms of (what some call) "extreme realism" about possible worlds. Peter Forrest argues that modal realism gives us reason to doubt the method of induction, as according to modal realism, there is a world where we are deceived by our senses and we may be in this world. [18]
On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) [1] is a book by the philosopher David Lewis that defends the thesis of modal realism. [2] " The thesis states that the world we are part of is but one of a plurality of worlds," as he writes in the preface, "and that we who inhabit this world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds."
David Lewis famously advocated for a position known as modal realism, which holds that possible worlds are real, concrete places which exist in the exact same sense that the actual world exists. On Lewis's account, the actual world is special only in that we live there.
In a postscript to "Mad Pain and Martian Pain" (published in Philosophical Papers, Volume I), Lewis takes a critical view of qualia.He explicitly identifies pain with qualia, observing that, "We say to the friend of qualia that, beneath his tendentious jargon, he is just talking pain and various aspects of its functional role."
A. David Lewis (born 1977), American comic writer and scholar of religion and literature; David Lewis (anthropologist) (born 1960), English scholar of development; David Lewis (lawyer) (c. 1520 –1584), Welsh civil lawyer and first Principal of Jesus College, Oxford; David Lewis (philosopher) (1941–2001), American philosopher
The use of "endure" and "perdure" to distinguish two ways in which an object can be thought to persist can be traced to David Lewis. One serious problem of endurantism is the problem of temporary intrinsics raised by David Lewis. Lewis claims that intrinsic properties of objects would change over time. [1]
Common knowledge was used by David Lewis in his pioneering game-theoretical account of convention. In this sense, common knowledge is a concept still central for linguists and philosophers of language (see Clark 1996) maintaining a Lewisian, conventionalist account of language.