page_title: Donald Cary Williams
section_title: Influence
hierarchical_section_title: Donald Cary Williams / Influence
caption_attribution_description: English: photograph of Donald C. Williams, Harvard Gazette, 30 December 1983
context_page_description: Donald Cary Williams, usually cited as D. C. Williams, was an American philosopher and a professor at both the University of California Los Angeles and at Harvard University.
context_section_description: Williams was at the height of his career in the 1940s and 1950s. During this period the type of metaphysics he pursued was unpopular and ridiculed by logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, and the later Wittgenstein. He was among a select few whose work in metaphysics persisted and made an impact on later philosophers. In addition, he fought back on various occasions – first against logical positivism and its verificationist theory of meaning and conventionalism about the a priori, and second against Wittgensteinian critiques of metaphysics. In other places he just scoffed at the ordinary language suggestion that problems about the world can be dissolved by studying the meaning and use of words. He once wrote: ‘It is hard enough to keep one’s face straight at any of those readings of philosophical fortunes from the tea leaves of language which our British cousins call “logic” nowadays, but when one knows that the very leaves have been rigged, it is time to lodge a protest, good manners be hanged’. For a number of reasons the fortunes of metaphysics turned around in the second half of the twentieth century. One reason is due to the influence of Williams’s work and instruction. 
  In the late 1960s and 1970s his work was studied closely at the University of Sydney by such philosophers as D. M. Armstrong, John Bacon, Keith Campbell, and David Stove. These philosophers took what Williams had to say seriously. Armstrong writes: ‘It so happens that Sydney University was for some years the world centre of Donald Williams studies’. Armstrong appreciated and implemented Williams’s conception of metaphysics and his distinction between analytic ontology and speculative cosmology in his theory of universals. Bacon and Campbell embraced Williams’s trope theory, expanding on the ontology and ensuring it remained a strong contender in the literature. Armstrong himself in later work came to realize the explanatory power of trope theory, which was a further boost to trope theory. Stove developed Williams’s theory of induction and it has been defended by others. 
  His instruction at Harvard spans several decades and he came into contact with many students who went on to have respectable careers in philosophy, e.g., Roderick Chisholm and Donald Davidson. He supervised Nicholas Wolterstorff whose theory of universals as kinds bears a strong resemblance to Williams’s ontology. But the student he influenced the most was David Lewis. As a student in the 1960s Lewis audited and enrolled in Williams’s courses on ontology and cosmology, absorbing his Humean approach to metaphysics and his belief that metaphysics is legitimate. Lewis owes in part his Humean supervenience, four-dimensionalism, and metaphysics of time more generally to Williams. Lewis also developed certain arguments from Williams that proved pivotal in his own philosophical development. Just as Williams exploited analogies between time and space, Lewis exploited analogies between time and modality. Just as Williams argued that a realm of subsistent entities would lead to scepticism about one's existence, Lewis argued that a realm of possibles would lead to scepticism about one's actuality. For Lewis, the way out of the sceptical worry was to take actuality as a relative matter and interpret the word 'actual' as an indexical. The indexical account of actuality was - in Lewis's mind - one step down the road to modal realism: possible worlds are just as real as our world. Later on his career Lewis gravitated more and more towards Williams’s ontology, expressing sympathy with a sparse theory of tropes. 
  Armstrong and Lewis were both influential figures who played their own part in bringing metaphysics back into mainstream philosophy. Given the influence of Williams on both Armstrong and Lewis, Williams played a key role in the revival of metaphysics. Williams’s articles on trope theory and four-dimensionalism are classic articles in analytic philosophy – anthologised in many places and recently collected together with previously unpublished essays that advance his metaphysical 
caption: Donald C. Williams, 11 March 1960
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