The Legacy of D. K. Lewis: Introduction to the Special Issue
- PDF / 173,859 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 96 Downloads / 151 Views
The Legacy of D. K. Lewis: Introduction to the Special Issue Marianna Antonutti Marfori2 · Pierluigi Graziani1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
David Kellogg Lewis was without doubt the most influential philosopher of his generation. In 2005, Daniel Nolan wrote of him that “much of his influence has been as a ‘philosopher’s philosopher’”. The impact of Lewis’s work on his contemporaries and on the following generations of philosophers has been both broad and deep. Using a Lewisian metaphor, one could say that his work is a coherent “mosaic” of ideas. This mosaic has been built step by step, tackling a number of philosophical issues and weaving a sophisticated and elegant dialogue with both the sciences and metaphysics. In order to better understand the influence of the Lewisian mosaic, the APhEx group (www.aphex.it) and the Department of Philosophy of the University of Urbino organised in partnership an international conference entitled “Another World is Possible: Conference on David K. Lewis”, 10 years after Lewis passed away. The conference took place in Urbino, Italy, from the 16th to the 18th of June, 2011. From the success of the conference, the idea was conceived of editing a collection specifically devoted to understanding Lewis’s legacy in the different areas of philosophy that he influenced. Several years from the Urbino conference, we are happy to see this Special Issue finally appear. It includes some contributions that grew out of the conference, as well as many others that were written especially for this collection. We are particularly happy that a number of former doctoral students and collaborators of Lewis agreed to contribute to this project. The publication of this Special Issue occurs in a period during which a number of important anniversaries concerning Lewis’s life and work are being marked: 50 years since the publication of Lewis’s first book “Convention: A Philosophical Study” in 1969 (based on his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard); the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the last volume of Lewis’s collected works in 2000; and 20 years since Lewis’s passing on October 14, 2001. This collection does not aim to reconstruct the
B
Pierluigi Graziani [email protected] Marianna Antonutti Marfori [email protected]
1
Department of Pure and Applied Sciences, University of Urbino, Urbino, Italy
2
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
123
Synthese
development of Lewis’s thought, nor to provide an introduction to or overview of his work, for which excellent sources are already available. Rather, it aims to provide a window onto Lewis’s enormous philosophical legacy by examining some of the most important ways in which Lewis’s ideas continue to shape the development of contemporary philosophical research. Unfortunately, any collection that aims to undertake an endeavour like assessing Lewis’s legacy can never fully succeed, partly because carrying out the task would involve more than a single volume
Data Loading...
