David Lewis's Place in Analytic Philosophy Scott Soames by The
David Lewis’s Place in Analytic Philosophy Scott Soames By the early 1970s, and continuing through 2001, David Lewis and Saul Kripke had taken over W.V.O. Quine’s leadership in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic in the English-speaking world. Quine, in turn, had inherited his position in the early 1950s from Rudolf Carnap, who had been the leading logical positivist -- first in Europe, and, after 1935, in America. A renegade positivist himself, Quine eschewed apriority, necessity, and analyticity, while (for a time) adopting a holistic version of verificationism. Like Carnap, he placed philosophical logic and the philosophy of science at the center of philosophy. While not entirely avoiding metaphysics and epistemology, he tried to “naturalize” both. By contrast, Lewis and Kripke embraced the modalities Quine rejected.1 They also had no sympathy for his early verificationism, or his twin flights from intension and intention. As for philosophy of science, it was transforming itself into specialized philosophies of the several sciences, and did not lend itself to unified treatment. Although Lewis had deep interests in scientific issues, and was commendably realist about science in general, science itself was not the center of own distinctive approach to philosophy. Despite similarities in their opposition to Quine, the differences between Lewis and Kripke were large – especially in the semantics and metaphysics of modality. They also had different philosophical styles. Whereas Lewis was a wide-ranging thinker who pieced together a systematic philosophical world view, Kripke gave little thought to system, focusing instead on a few central topics. There is, therefore, no conflict between the two on many of the issues on which Kripke was silent.
[Show full text]