Biography of clarence irving lewis

Clarence Irving Lewis (), American philosopher, was a pioneer in symbolic logic and the founder of conceptual pragmatism.

Born on April 12, , C. I. Lewis received his bachelor's degree from Harvard, having studied with Josiah Royce and William James. After teaching at the University of Colorado, he returned to Harvard in and was awarded his doctorate 2 years later. During this period he studied with George Santayana and Ralph Barton Perry, as well as with Royce. He had married Mabel Maxwell Graves in

In Lewis went to the University of California to teach philosophy. He was given the task of teaching symbolic logic and, finding no textbook in English for the course, set out to write one. Survey of Symbolic Logic was published in while Lewis was serving in the U.S. Army. This book contains not only the first history of the subject in English but also Lewis's own system of intensional logic based on strict implication. The final presentation of this system was Symbolic Logic (), written with Cooper Harold Langford.

In Lewis returned to Harvard as a professor of philosophy. While teaching he also worked out his theory of conceptual pragmatism, published in Mind and the World-order (). According to Lewis, knowledge consists of the conceptual interpretation of the empirically given data of experience. Basic concepts utilized in the interpretation are a priori. However, the mind is not fitted out with a set of categories once and for all, as Immanuel Kant had claimed. Rather, the categories are selected pragmatically—that is, with attention to the ends of action, for which knowledge is gained and into which it issues.

Lewis's lectures before the American Philosophical Association were published as Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (). The book was divided into three parts. The first described Lewis's theory of logic; the second advanced his theory of empirical knowledge; and the last set forth his theory of value judgment. The

1. Brief Biography

C.I. Lewis was born on April 12, in Stoneham, Massachusetts and died on February 2, in Menlo Park, California. He was an undergraduate at Harvard from –, where he was influenced principally by the pragmatist, William James, and the idealist, Josiah Royce. Royce also supervised Lewis’s Harvard Ph.D. dissertation “ The Place of Intuition in Knowledge”. While serving as Royce’s teaching assistant in logic, Lewis read Whitehead’s and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, a book he both admired and criticized. Later, while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley from –, his principal research interests switched to logic. Lewis wrote a series of articles on symbolic logic culminating in his monograph A Survey of Symbolic Logic (SSL) (Lewis ) in which he both surveyed developments in symbolic logic from Leibniz up to his own day and presented his own modal system of strict implication. However, in response to criticism of his account of strict implication, Lewis deleted these sections from reprints of SSL and revised his treatment of their topics for his co-authored book Symbolic Logic (SL) (Lewis and Langford ) — “the first comprehensive treatment of systems of strict implication (or indeed of systems of modal logic at all)”, according to Hughes and Cresswell (, ).

Lewis returned to Harvard in , where he taught until his retirement in , becoming Edgar Peirce Professor of Philosophy in At Harvard, Lewis’ major research interest switched back to epistemology. Starting with his much reprinted article, “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori” (Lewis ), he developed a distinctive position of his own which he labeled “conceptual pragmatism” and which he presented in a systematic way in his book Mind and the World Order (MWO) (Lewis ). MWO established Lewis as a major figure on the American philosophical scene. In the

Biography

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