Clarence Irving Lewis
From Free net encyclopedia
Clarence Irving Lewis (April 12, 1883 Stoneham, Massachusetts - February 3, 1964 Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American academic philosopher. Educated at Harvard University, he taught there 1920-1953, after a stint at the University of California, 1912-20. Willard Quine was the next person to fill his Chair in Harvard's Philosophy department.
Lewis is included among the American pragmatists. He wrote at length about epistemology and ethics, and supported Bayesian probability. He was also the first to employ the term "qualia", popularized by his student Nelson Goodman, in its generally-agreed modern sense.
Lewis was a major logician, learning the subject from Josiah Royce who also supervised his Ph.D. thesis. Lewis took exception to Bertrand Russell's notion of material implication that pervades Principia Mathematica. Lewis' response was to devise a system of modal logic that is the ancestor of all modern work on the subject. Lewis and Langford (1932), the culmination of Lewis's work on logic, sets out the modal logics S1 through S5 as the first formal analyses of the alethic modalities.
{{academia |teachers=Josiah Royce |students=Nelson Goodman }}
Selected works
- 1918. A Survey of Symbolic Logic. Partly republished by Dover in 1960.
- 1932. Symbolic Logic (with Cooper H Langford). Dover reprint, 1959.
- 1947. An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation.
- 1955. The Ground and Nature of Right.
- 1956 (1929). Mind and World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge.
- 1957. Our Social Inheritance.
- 1969 (John Lange, ed.). Values and Imperatives: Studies in Ethics. Stanford Uni. Press.
- 1970 (Goheen, J. D., and Mothershead, J. L. Jr., eds. ). Collected Papers. Stanford Uni. Press.
Secondary literature:
- Schilpp, P. A., ed., 1968. The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 13). Open Court. Contains an autobiographical essay and extensive discussion of his work.
- Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton University Press.