C. I. Lewis Quotes on Knowledge
C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order (1929) and An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946) gave early-to-mid-twentieth-century American philosophy its most influential synthesis of the pragmatist tradition with the rising analytic philosophy of language. The central project develops a conceptualistic pragmatism in which the categorial frameworks through which experience is interpreted are pragmatically chosen for their service to inquiry rather than read off from a presuppositionless given — but in which the corresponding distinction between the empirically given and the conceptual frame remains essential to the philosophical analysis of knowledge. The framework, drawing on Peirce and the broader Harvard pragmatist tradition where Lewis trained under Royce and James, shaped subsequent analytic epistemology through the broader debate over the analytic-synthetic distinction and supplied a principal philosophical target for Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”
Quotes
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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.”
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“I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene : and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.”
On Edmund Spenser 's long poem in a letter to Arthur Greeves (7 March 1916), published in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis : Family Letters, 1905–1931 (2004) edited by Walter Hooper, p. 170 -
“Part of a diary entry dated "Wednesday–Wednesday 9–16 July", 1924, regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay .”
But the man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two -
“But the man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two”
Lewis, C. S. (1991). Hooper, Walter. ed (in English). All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927 . San Diego - New York - London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. p. 344. ISBN 0151046093 . -
“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 1932) — in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963) (1979), p. 439