David Lewis’s Place in Analytic Philosophy

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Soames
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Saul Kripke ◽  
A Priority

This chapter is devoted to one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century, David Lewis. The key to understanding this author of so many works in so many areas of philosophy is to see how his views are related to those of his colleague Saul Kripke as well as to those of his teacher W. V. O. Quine. Like Kripke, Lewis embraced the modalities (necessity and a priority) that Quine rejected. Also like Kripke, Lewis had no sympathy for Quine’s early verificationism or his flights from intension and intention, and he was straightforwardly a realist about science in general. However, despite these similarities with Kripke, Lewis’s analysis of necessity could not be more different from Kripke’s. Quine taught that vindicating naturalism and extensionalism required eliminating intensional facts and rejecting intensional constructions, his student Lewis, however, tried to show that intensional facts are just a species of extensional facts, and that intensional constructions in language are no threat to the integrity of an austere, naturalistic vision of reality.

Analytic Philosophy in America

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Soames
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
William James ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Saul Kripke ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Philosophical Debates

This chapter traces the development of analytic philosophy in the United States, starting with the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and (later) Clarence Irving Lewis, and continuing through the great immigration of philosophers of science, philosophical logicians, and logical positivists from the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of World War II. It also provides broad-brush overviews of some of the most important philosophical debates that occupied American analytic philosophers during the last half of the twentieth century, including the Quine–Carnap debate about meaning and analyticity, the struggle over modality, the rise of philosophical logic and its application to the study of natural language, the Davidsonian program, Saul Kripke and the end of the linguistic turn, John Rawls and the resuscitation of normative theory, and a smattering of other, more specialized topics.

scholarly journals Philosophy as Synchronic History

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
DANIEL STOLJAR
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Philosophical Progress ◽  
The Way

Abstract Bernard Williams argues that philosophy is in some deep way akin to history. This article is a novel exploration and defense of the Williams thesis (as I call it)—though in a way anathema to Williams himself. The key idea is to apply a central moral from what is sometimes called the analytic philosophy of history of the 1960s to the philosophy of philosophy of today, namely, the separation of explanation and laws. I suggest that an account of causal explanation offered by David Lewis may be modified to bring out the way in which this moral applies to philosophy, and so to defend the Williams thesis. I discuss in detail the consequences of the thesis for the issue of philosophical progress and note also several further implications: for the larger context of contemporary metaphilosophy, for the relation of philosophy to other subjects, and for explaining, or explaining away, the belief that success in philosophy requires a field-specific ability or brilliance.

Metaphilosophical metamorphoses of analytic philosophy of language

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Szubka
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Current State ◽  
First Philosophy ◽  
New Millennium

Abstract The paper begins with an account of the emergence of analytic philosophy of language in the twentieth century in the context of the development of logic and the linguistic turn. Subsequently, it describes two examples of analytic philosophy of language in its heyday when the discipline was conceived as first philosophy. Finally, it provides, by way of conclusion, a succinct outline of the current state of philosophy of language, marked by modesty and fragmentation. It is claimed that even if one retains optimism about the prospects of philosophy of language in the first century of the new millennium, it would be unreasonable to disagree with the opinion that the present-day philosophy of language is a highly specialized and diversified discipline and no longer so central for philosophical enterprise as it used to be.

scholarly journals The Linguistic Philosophy of Noam Chomsky

2014 ◽  
pp. 103-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Binoy Barman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Human Child ◽  
Mental Exercise ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy

Noam Chomsky, one of the most famous linguists of the twentieth century, based his linguistic works on certain philosophical doctrines. His main contribution to linguistics is Transformational Generative Grammar, which is founded on mentalist philosophy. He opposes the behaviourist psychology in favour of innatism for explaining the acquisition of language. He claims that it becomes possible for human child to learn a language for the linguistic faculty with which the child is born, and that the use of language for an adult is mostly a mental exercise. His ideas brought about a revolution in linguistics, dubbed as Chomskyan Revolution. According to him, the part of language which is innate to human being would be called Universal Grammar. His philosophy holds a strong propensity to rationalism in search of a cognitive foundation. His theory is a continuation of analytic philosophy, which puts language in the centre of philosophical investigation. He would also be identified as an essentialist. This paper considers various aspects of Chomsky’s linguistic philosophy with necessary elaborations.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/pp.v51i1-2.17681

Sidgwick's Epistemology

Utilitas ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN DEIGH
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Axiomatic System ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
Henry Sidgwick ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Traditional Understanding

This article concerns two themes in Bart Schultz's recent biography of Henry Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe. The first is the importance of Sidgwick's conflict over his religious beliefs to the development of his thinking in The Methods of Ethics. I suggest that, in addition to the characteristics of Methods that Schulz highlights, the work's epistemology, specifically, Sidgwick's program of presenting ethics as an axiomatic system on the traditional understanding of such systems, is due to the conflict. The second is the relative neglect into which Methods fell in the first part of the twentieth century, neglect Schultz attributes to changes in philosophical fashions and to the undue influence of the Bloomsbury literati on British intellectual culture. I suggest that there is a deeper explanation, which lies in Sidgwick's program of presenting ethics as an axiomatic system on the traditional understanding of such systems. Such programs, I argue, became obsolete in analytic philosophy owing to changes in how axiomatization in mathematics was understood that resulted initially from the rise of non-Euclidean geometries and ultimately from the collapse of Frege's and Russell's logicism.

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