1001Philosophers

C. I. Lewis Quotes

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. The quotes below are attributed to C. I. Lewis, organized by topic.

C. I. Lewis on Knowledge

  • Attributed to C. I. Lewis:

    “There can be no a priori knowledge save by way of categorial schemes.”

  • Attributed to C. I. Lewis:

    “Pragmatism is not the rejection of the a priori but the reinterpretation of it.”

  • Attributed to C. I. Lewis:

    “All knowledge of the world is in some way categorical.”

Read all C. I. Lewis quotes on Knowledge

C. I. Lewis on Mind

  • Attributed to C. I. Lewis:

    “Mind and the world order require each other.”

C. I. Lewis on Virtue

  • Attributed to C. I. Lewis:

    “Values are qualities of experience, open to empirical investigation.”