Lewis’s philosophical method

Lewis is famous as a contemporary philosophical system-builder. The most obvious way his philosophy exhibited a system was in its content: Lewis’s metaphysics provided answers to many metaphysical puzzles in an integrated way. In this chapter, the author offers some suggestions about how Lewis’s own methodological stances can be improved. The chapter begins with “starting points”: places where Lewis looked for data for philosophical inquiries. This is followed by a section on one of the distinctive features of Lewis’s technique of philosophical analysis: the project of specifying theoretical roles and then identifying deservers of those roles. This is one of the best-known pieces of Lewisian method, despite an absence of any discussion of it in Lewis’s 1983 remarks on method. The author also pays attention to the project of weighing costs and benefits, and philosophical theory-selection in this way.