Lewis, David

Lewis, David (Kellogg)

(born Sept. 28, 1941, Oberlin, Ohio, U.S.—died Oct. 14, 2001, Princeton, N.J.) U.S. philosopher. He taught at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1966 to 1970 and thereafter at Princeton University. A wide-ranging thinker, Lewis made important—in some cases groundbreaking—contributions to a number of fields. He was best known for his extreme realism regarding possible worlds; his defense of the identity theory in the philosophy of mind (see also mind-body problem); and his doctrine of “Humean supervenience” (named for the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume), according to which all truths about any possible world are determined by the distribution of properties attributable to specific points in space and time in that world (see supervenience). At the time of his death, he was widely considered the leading figure in analytic philosophy.