Clarence Irving Lewis

Clarence Irving Lewis (April 12, 1883 Stoneham, Massachusetts - February 3, 1964 Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American academic philosopher and founder of conceptual pragmatism. Lewis became famous early in his career as a logician, branched into epistemology, and spent the last 20 years as a prolific writer on ethics. Educated at Harvard University, Lewis taught there from 1920-1953, where he held the prestigious Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy. Willard Van Orman Quine was the next person to fill Lewis' Chair in Harvard's Philosophy department. Before returning to Harvard Lewis taught at the University of California, 1912-20. His complete archives remain in California, at Stanford University.

Life

C. I. Lewis was born April 12, 1883 in Stoneham, Massachusetts in relative poverty. Lewis first came to philosophy when he was 13 years old, studying the ancient Greek pre-Socratic thinkers, namely Anaxagoras and Heraclitus. The first work of philosophy Lewis recalls studying was a short history of Greek philosophy written by Marshall. The major influence on Lewis' philosophy was Immanuel Kant. As Lewis writes in his article "Logic and Prgamatism": "Nothing comparable in importance happened my life until I became acquainted with Kant....Kant compelled me. He had, so I felt, followed scepticism to its inevitable last stage, and laid the foundations where they could not be disturbed."

Lewis attended Harvard in the fall of 1902, completing his bachelor's degree in spring of 1906. During this time, Lewis was in a committed relationship with his high school sweetheart, Mable Maxwell Graves. Upon completion of the bachelor's Lewis and Mable Graves moved to Boulder, Colorado, where Lewis had received a position as a teacher of English, which he kept for two years. In the winter of 1906, Lewis married Mable. By 1908, Lewis entered the Ph.D program at Harvard, which he completed in an astoundingly brief 2 years.

Later in his life, Lewis would suffer the tragedy of his daughter's death in 1930. Lewis would also suffer a heart attack in 1932 after over-stress and over-work. Nonetheless, this was one of the most productive decades of Lewis' thinking. The completion of Mind and the World Order (1929, first edition) marked one of the most important epistemological works of the 20th century.

Work in Logic

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. Replacing material implication with strict implication, Lewis formulated an intensional logic founded on the premise that a false antecedent generates a false consequent, instead of a true consequent, which Russell's formal implication insists. Thus, 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.

Work in Epistemology

Lewis is included among the American pragmatists. He wrote at length about epistemology and ethics, and his 1947 book, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation contains two chapters on aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He was also the first to employ the term "qualia", popularized by his student Nelson Goodman, in its generally-agreed modern sense.

Selected works

Online bibliography.

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.

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