David Lewis is the most influential analytic philosopher of the latter 20th century, having made singular contributions to problems spanning time travel, necessity and possibility, causation, probability and decision theory, personal identity, laws of nature, and the meaning of counterfactual statements. For Lewis, these various contributions amount to a “prolonged campaign” for just one idea: that “all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another.” As innocuous, even intuitive as this idea may appear, Lewis shows that it has bewildering consequences. It means that the truth of propositions like “I could have taken a different route on my morning commute” or “the match you struck might not have lit” requires us to posit an infinite plurality of concrete, fully real “possible worlds” whose inhabitants realize, or fail to realize, the possibilities we assert. It means that no object persists through time by remaining wholly itself, but rather exists as an assemblage of “temporal parts” extended in a four-dimensional space. In fact, it means that any collection of objects composes an object, so that not only do my head, torso, and appendages compose an object (my body), but so too do my body, the Eiffel Tower, and the moons of Jupiter. Lewis’s arguments are ingenious and amusing, but above all they challenge our assumptions about what a philosophical theory can do. Can an argument, however elegant and forceful, convince us of the truth of what we could never empirically verify? How do we judge the merits of a philosophical theory when its conclusions run drastically counter to our pre-theoretical intuitions? Indeed, how can we hope to refute such extravagant theories if, as Lewis himself put it, all we can muster in lieu of argument are “incredulous stares”?
In this course, we will explore these questions as we survey David Lewis’s signature philosophical positions. Beginning with Lewis’s exploration of the paradoxes of time travel and personal identity, we’ll then turn to Lewis’s infamous “modal realism,” drawing from his provocative On the Plurality of Worlds to elaborate its consequences for the nature of causation, natural laws, mental content, and much else. From there we’ll look at Lewis’s “mereology,” or theory of parts and wholes, as well as his linguistic theory of “conversational scorekeeping.” As we’ll see, Lewis’s thought remains a fertile source of philosophical inspiration, offering a model for such contemporary issues as the nature of artificial intelligence and the dynamics of LLM interactions.
There *is* no physical Brooklyn Institute. We hold our classes all over (thus far) Brooklyn and Manhattan, in alternative spaces ranging from the back rooms of bars to bookstores to spaces in cultural centers, including the Center for Jewish History, the Goethe-Institut, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. We can (and do) turn any space into a classroom. You will be notified of the exact location when you register for a class.
Instructors will contact students approximately one week prior to the first class with reading assignments and details about the course location.
