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Portrait of David Lewis

20th century · 1941–2001

Who influenced David Lewis?

Influences

On the Plurality of Worlds: modal realism and the metaphysics of counterfactuals.

David Lewis was influenced by W. V. O. Quine. That is 1 line of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.

Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Unknown author, Public domain See the whole map

Who was David Lewis?

David Lewis taught at Princeton from 1970 until his death and visited Australia's philosophers nearly every year for three decades. He did important work across the philosophy of mind, language, probability, mathematics, time and science.

He is best known for his metaphysics. In Counterfactuals (1973) he gave, alongside Robert Stalnaker, the most widely used account of counterfactual conditionals, and in On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) he defended modal realism: possible worlds are concrete and as real as our own, which is just one of them.

Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.

Who influenced David Lewis?

1 direct influence on this map, earliest first.

The line of teachers behind David Lewis

The longest documented line of influence ending at David Lewis runs 28 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.

  1. Thales of Miletus
  2. Anaximenes of Miletus
  3. Anaxagoras
  4. Socrates
  5. Antisthenes
  6. Diogenes of Sinope
  7. Crates of Thebes
  8. Zeno of Citium
  9. Seneca
  10. Tertullian
  11. Augustine of Hippo
  12. Anselm of Canterbury
  13. Peter Lombard
  14. Thomas Aquinas
  15. René Descartes
  16. Thomas Hobbes
  17. Baruch Spinoza
  18. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  19. Christian Wolff
  20. Immanuel Kant
  21. Johann Gottlieb Fichte
  22. F. W. J. Schelling
  23. Georg W. F. Hegel
  24. T. H. Green
  25. F. H. Bradley
  26. Bertrand Russell
  27. Rudolf Carnap
  28. W. V. O. Quine
  29. David Lewis

Two steps away from David Lewis

Indirect influences

Contemporaries of David Lewis

Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of David Lewis, with no direct line between them.

David Lewis by the numbers

Direct influences
1
Direct followers
0
Thinkers upstream
107
Thinkers downstream
0
Wikipedia languages
26 — #80 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
Card rarity
Rare

Questions about David Lewis

Who influenced David Lewis?
W. V. O. Quine.
Who did David Lewis influence?
No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on David Lewis.
When did David Lewis live?
1941–2001. The map files David Lewis under the 20th century.
How rare is the David Lewis card?
Wikipedia carries an article on David Lewis in 26 languages, which makes it a Rare card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.

More 20th-century philosophers

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