C. I. Lewis 1883 – 1964
Clarence Irving Lewis was an American philosopher and the principal figure of the third generation of American pragmatism. A long-serving professor at Harvard, he made foundational contributions to modal logic in his Survey of Symbolic Logic and Symbolic Logic, and developed in Mind and the World Order a conceptual pragmatism in which a priori categorial schemes are chosen on practical grounds. His later Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation extended this framework to ethics, arguing that values are objective qualities of experience open to empirical investigation.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Pragmatism, Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“Mind and the world order require each other.”
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“There can be no a priori knowledge save by way of categorial schemes.”
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“Pragmatism is not the rejection of the a priori but the reinterpretation of it.”
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“All knowledge of the world is in some way categorical.”
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“Values are qualities of experience, open to empirical investigation.”