David Lewis Quotes
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher and one of the most influential figures of late twentieth-century analytic metaphysics. Holding chairs at UCLA and Princeton, he produced an extraordinary range of work in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethics, unified by his commitment to systematic explanation. The quotes below are attributed to David Lewis, organized by topic.
Browse David Lewis by topic
David Lewis on Knowledge
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Attributed to David Lewis:
“A theory pays a price in ontological commitment for the explanatory benefits it confers.”
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“Art and the ability to comprehend it are more dependent on kinds of mental imagery and the ability to manipulate mental images than on intelligence.”
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (2002), p. 111.
David Lewis on Mind
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“The contemporary Western emphasis on the supreme value of intelligence has tended to suppress certain forms of consciousness and to regard them as irrational, marginal, aberrant or even pathological and thereby to eliminate them from investigations of the deep past.”
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (2002), p. 121.
David Lewis on Truth
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Attributed to David Lewis:
“There are so many other worlds, in fact, that absolutely every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is.”
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Attributed to David Lewis:
“I believe that there are possible worlds other than the one we happen to inhabit.”
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Attributed to David Lewis:
“The actual world is the world we are part of, no more and no less actual than any other world is to its inhabitants.”
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Attributed to David Lewis:
“Reality is, in the end, an ample plurality.”