Background
Lewis, Clarence lrving was born on April 12, 1883 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, United States.
Lewis, Clarence lrving was born on April 12, 1883 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, United States.
Harvard University, BA 1906.
1905 6, Instructor in English, University of Colorado. 1911-1920, Instructor to Assistant Professor in Philosophy, University of California. 1920-1964, Lecturer to Edgar Peirce Professor of Philosophy, then Emeritus Professor (1953 64).
Harvard University; 1953 60, Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University.
From his earliest years Lewis was preoccupied with philosophical questions. His interests were further stimulated by the dialectical oppositions of pragmatism, realism and idealism represented at Harvard by James. Perry and Royce. Although Lewis's philosophical thought eventually developed into a singular form of pragmatism, it lS profoundly indebted to Royce’s idealism. When studying Whitehead and Russell’s Pr‘n~ cipia Mathematica, a copy of which Royce gave him. Lewis rejected its theory of material irnphcation: it seemed absurd that a false proposition could imply a true one. Hence Lewis proposed an intensional logic of strict implication, published in 1918. which also presents the first history of the development of symbolic logic. Corrected and enlarged in 1932, Lewis’s system defines implication in terms of the logical modalities ot possibility and necessity. A relation of strict implication holds between two propositions if11 is impossible for the first proposition to be true and the second to be false. In his early years on the Harvard faculty Lewis studied the Peirce papers. These papers, along with work for his courses on German philosophyespecially on Kant, led him away from concentration on logic to reflection on fundamenta problems in the theory of knowledge. In The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge (1926), his Howison Lecture at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, Lewis unveiled his conceptualistic pragmatism, which he elaborated in detail in Mind ad6 the World Order (1929). Maintaining the pragmatist conception of mind as an evolved natura •nstrument, Lewis none the less stressed, like Kant, the formal conceptual aspects of knowledge. Capable of constructing alternative sets of concepts, the mind chooses pragmatically which ** 'l will use to interpret the data. Lewis's intention to proceed from epistemology to ethics was delayed by the movement of 'ogical positivism, which in its heyday advocated a Purely syntactic conception of the a priori and a uoncognitivist theory of value judgements. An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946). based °n Lewis’s Paul Carus Lectures before the American Philosophical Association in December 1945, became the text from which American Philosophizing set out in the immediate postwar Period. Seeking to reestablish the cognitive character of the value judgement as a foundation tor moral theory, Lewis surveyed the entire field of Knowledge, distinguishing three kinds: analytic a Priori judgements; empirical beliefs; and ' alue judgements, which, he held, exhibit the same ePistemological structure as empirical beliefs and are equally objective. Applauded as a wellconstructed refutation of the major tenets of the 'ogical positivists, Lewis’s work actually marked a suPersession of logical positivism by a more sophisticated and less reductionist logical empiricism. Its defense of a strict distinction between the analytic a priori and the empirical a posteriori, its °undationalism in epistemology and its use of Jbentalistic language, however, fell out of favour in ater Anglo-American philosophy. Lewis’s cognitivist theory of value judgment ocated value naturalistically within the context of. ntnan experience. Intrinsically value as the good 's aesthetic. In The Ground and Nature of the Right ' * 955) Lewis distinguished the good from the right, the former being desirable and the latter Operative. In Our Social Inheritance (1957) Lewis, pressed l° take up social philosophy because of the acceleration of social change, emphasized our s°cial heritage, man’s social memory, for making Possible the civilized conditions of human life. Urc®s: Edwards; Who’s Who in America; New York Times. 4 Feb 1964.