Talk:David Kellogg Lewis

message: David Lewis also wrote a rather famous piece about time travel arguing for the differences between personal and external time.  He believed that time travel was possible on a single timeline and not a multi-verse... does anything know enough about this to write about it some? gren 01:31, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time travel 

message: I think this should be moved to David Kellog Lewis with David Lewis (philosopher) as a redirect page to it. gren 01:31, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, I've done it.   I'll get rid of the double redirects. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 21:06, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move 

message: Sorry. But i did not understand that period.
Lewis was born in Oberlin, Ohio, to a Professor of Government at Oberlin College and a distinguished medieval historian
I am translating this article into Portuguese, and i think that this information is about Lewis's parents. Is it that?
Lewis's parents were John D. Lewis Professor of Government and Ruth Ewart Kellogg Lewis medieval historian. David Kellogg Lewis is survived by his wife Stephie Lewis and two siblings Donald E. Lewis who owns and runs a car repair business and Ellen Lewis a child psychologist.
Rose-design@hotmail.com 22:02, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Biography 

message: Hi! There's a mistake on the page when you're writing about the history of possible worlds in philosophy: C. S. Lewis was a writer, not a logician; the one who dealt with modal logic is C. I. Lewis. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.98.188.212 (talk) 09:04, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  A mistake 

message: A related objection is that, while people are concerned with what they could have done, they are not concerned with what some people in other worlds, no matter how similar to them, do.
The needed citation is already retold in next sentence:
As Saul Kripke once put it, a presidential candidate could not care less whether someone else, in another world, wins an election, but with whether he himself could have won it (Kripke 1980, p. 45).
The full citation is:
Thus if we say ‘Humphrey might have won the election (if only he had done such-and-such), we [according to Lewis] are not talking about something that might have happened to Humphrey but to someone else, a “counterpart”.’ Probably, however, Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world.
(Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”, p. 45, fn. 13, italics original, note in square brackets mine.)
Note that this criticism addresses Lewis’ counterpart theory rather than his realism about possible worlds. In the article they seem not to be clearly distinguished.--193.219.41.244 (talk) 15:04, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  About needed citation 

message: I stumbleupon'ed this  and this is what the person above seems to be referring to. However, that linked article is very short and lacking in details so I went here to find out more. Nothing about that mentioned in the WP article David Kellog Lewis though.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.106.182.81 (talk) 19:36, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time Travel 

message: It's clear that he influenced Kripke, and it was easy to find the citation for Kripke, and to find that Kripke acknowledges the influence.  It wasn't so easy to find the citations for the other people listed, so for the time being, I removed them.  They need actual citations, not just to mention that they exist, if this article is to be improved.  Rosen, in particular, doesn't have a Wikiarticle nor can I easily find the citation with basic academic searches.--Levalley (talk) 04:56, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Influence of Lewis 

message: :WP Phil importance criteria notes: "Most people involved in the history of philosophy will be rated in this level."
:That easily covers Lewis.
::"David Lewis was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. His corpus is extraordinary for its breadth of subject matter and for its systematicity."
::Alan Hájek, The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2006).
:As for cites covering influences, time constrains me to pass on that atm. Alastair Haines (talk) 13:49, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Importance upgrade to Mid correct 

message: I'd rather like to add Australian realism to Analytic in the School of thought section of the info box.
::"In 1963 [Lewis] befriended J.J.C. Smart, who visited Harvard from Australia, consolidating Lewis as an 'Australian materialist' about the mind: mental states are physical states—specifically, neurochemical states—that play certain causal roles. An argument for this position is expounded in his first publication, 'An Argument for the Identity Theory'. In Smart's graduate seminar, Lewis met Stephanie Robinson, whom he married in 1965." (Hájek:2006)
Australian philosophy is rather endebted to his influence and friendship. It's there in a reliable source, a recent one, and it's not likely to change. If there are no strong objections in the next year or so, I'll probably be bold and add it. Alastair Haines (talk) 16:01, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  School of thought 

message: I'm going to suggest some improvements in response to Lavalley's request, and according to the six Good Article Criteria.
;1. Well-written 
:(a) clear and correct—the current article is fine so far
:(b) style—ditto, sensible structure, interesting
;2. Reliable
:(a) reliably sourced—the few sources mentioned are excellent, tertiary sources and sourced criticism are lacking
:(b) in-line footnotes—nothing really detailed yet, more quotes and controversy are needed 
:(c) original research—to my limited knowledge, everything sounds well-known to semi-specialists in philosophy
;3. Broad 
:(a) covers main issues—yes
:(b) no digression—yes
:(This criterion lacks a subsection to cover the main point of the section!)
:Not a GA criterion but (c) breadth—current revision is not comprehensive
;4. Neutral
:yes :)
;5. Stable
:yes :( not enough happening here
;6. Illustrated
:(a) image publication data—no, neither image is adequately tagged with reliable copyright information
:(b) images relevant and captioned—yes 
;Summary:
There are really only a few things needed to move forwards (imo):
# tertiary sources that indicate breadth of Lewis' notable published work (it is, in fact, very broad)
# clear summaries of each area of Lewis' thinking, with footnoted quotes and references to later citation of his work
# diagrams could help make some of Lewis' abstract thinking more user-friendly
:there's a good diagram in Counterfactuals if I recall correctly, it's been more than 20 years since I read it
:that'd be copyright (I think) but we could probably make a more swanky version just for Wiki. Would that be OR? Hmmmm.
# fix up the image copyright issues! Princeton and Stephanie would probably say "yes", contact them!
A last thought. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plans to publish two articles on David Lewis: a general one, and one on his metaphysics. If anyone would care for a fun challenge, you and your team could strive to get this article featured at Wiki before Stanford publish online. It would be an impressive example of how much faster a Wikipedia can produce a quality article for general readership. Perhaps someone would like to offer a bounty on this article? A donation to Wiki if we get it featured before Stanford publish theirs online?
I'll be leaving this article on my watchlist, and will do all I can to help anyone wanting to push it forward. Cheers Alastair Haines (talk) 12:31, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Peer review 

message: "One of the main concerns of Lewis (1986) is to address some of these criticisms."
Someone correctly tagged this sentence with "fact?" Lewis 1986 has a substantial introduction, which is explicit about why he selected the papers that are published in that volume. He gives many reasons, some more significant than others, but does not address "these criticisms" (i.e. those in the current revision of the Wiki article).
Lewis 1986 is (in part) online and a link is now supplied in the article. His intro provides a reliable source par excellence regarding his aims, both in Philosophical Papers and more broadly. There he says this:
::What I want to fight are philosophical arguments against Humean supervenience. When philosophers claim that one or another commonplace feature of the world cannot supervene on the arrangement of qualities, I make it my business to resist. Being a commonsensical fellow (except where unactualized possible worlds are concerned) I will seldom deny that the features in question exist. I grant their existence, and do my best to show how they can, after all, supervene on the arrangement of qualities.
::David Lewis, Philosophical Papers (vol. II, OUP US, 1986, p. xi.)
Cheers, Alastair Haines (talk) 04:34, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unsourced text removal 

message: As far as I know, there is no reason to use the word "demise" rather than "death" in the section heading concerning his "later life and death." Before I changed it, it read, "later life and demise," which seems to suggest a failure or a downfall. Death is, therefore, a more objective term appropriate for an encyclopedia. Now, if he ever referred to his death as his "demise," that would change things, but as far as I can tell, there is no reason to prefer the less common and more value-laden word.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Brijohn6882 (talk • contribs) 17:39, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changed "Demise" to "Death"