The Age of Metaphysical Revolution: David Lewis and His Place in the History of Analytic Philosophy

大卫·刘易斯（David Lewis, 1941-2001）是一位形而上学的革命家，他在分析哲学史上发挥了革命性的作用。1986年，他出版了改变游戏规则的《论世界的多元性》。他认为我们的宇宙或世界只是众多宇宙或世界中的一个。不幸的是，我们不能去那里旅行；可以说，它们是相互隔绝的“孤岛宇宙”。但是有无限多个宇宙或世界，所有可能发生的事情都发生在其中一个宇宙或世界的某个地方。著名的刘易斯宣称，有些世界里有会说话的驴子，有些世界里有独角兽。根据刘易斯的说法，我们所有人，在日常生活中，每天都在谈论来自其他世界的生物。当你考虑到你可能有不同的朋友、家庭或不同的职业的可能性时，你想到的是那些孤岛宇宙中的另一个人，一个现实生活中的doppelgänger，一个和你一样的人，只是他们有不同的朋友、不同的家庭或不同的职业。刘易斯的这番话引起了很多人的不满；众所周知，许多哲学家只是难以置信地回头看。但是之后的分析哲学就不一样了。他以一种早已过时的盛大方式打开了玄学思辨的大门；他对现实的看法和他自己的看法一样广泛，很快就成了主流。刘易斯是如何在没有人同意他的情况下带来这种范式转变的？为什么他以这些非凡的主张开创的形而上学革命时代今天还在继续，而且，不管怎样，明天还在继续？简单地说，历史的脉络贯穿了刘易斯。刘易斯在科学和常识之间重新发现了形而上学。他自己的智力之旅把他从牛津带到哈佛，在那里他学会了尊重常识和日常语言，在那里他接受了艾瑞斯·默多克（Iris Murdoch）的辅导，并由斯特劳森（Strawson）讲课，在那里他吸收了奎因系统的、以科学为导向的哲学。后来，刘易斯经常访问澳大利亚，斯马特和阿姆斯特朗对唯物主义形而上学的探索为他铺平了道路。刘易斯成熟的哲学是不同寻常的，因为他综合了所有这些影响。他认为哲学的目标是在科学和常识之间取得平衡。刘易斯认为形而上学是值得尊敬的，因为形而上学的结果是努力将常识和科学结合在一个包含理论的网络中。他激励了一代哲学家去研究形而上学，因为即使大多数人不相信会说话的驴子（所以他们认为他没有找到正确的平衡），刘易斯也不是专制主义者。他让每个人都可以自由地进行自己的形而上学研究；刘易斯让我们每个人自己判断，什么时候我们在这些力量之间取得了平衡，这是每个哲学家都要用自己的智力良知来解决的问题。刘易斯不仅因其出版的著作而闻名，还因他与世界各地哲学家的积极交往而闻名，他在职业生涯中与1000多名哲学家的通信证明了这一点。他的遗孀斯蒂芬妮·刘易斯（Stephanie Lewis）向我们提供了他的哲学书信和其他死后论文。通过首次公开这一非凡的历史资源，她为我们提供了一个独特的机会来追溯她丈夫从新手到形而上的梦想家的智力旅程。我们项目的一项主要任务是从刘易斯和他的对话者之间的数千页信件中选出最具启示意义的信件，并编辑这些材料以供出版，使其可供后代的哲学家和哲学历史学家使用。但是，理解是什么使这种或那种交流具有启发性，是与理解我们当前形而上学时代的起源联系在一起的。所以我们的共同目标是写出第一部20世纪晚期分析哲学史来解释我们的形而上学革命时代。

David Lewis (1941-2001) was a metaphysical revolutionary, who played a transformative role in the history of analytic philosophy. In 1986 he published his game-changing On the Plurality of Worlds. He argued that our universe or world is only one of many universes or worlds. Unfortunately we can't travel to them; they are, so to speak, 'island universes', disconnected from one another. But there are infinitely many universes or worlds, and everything that can happen does happen somewhere in one of them. Famously Lewis declared that there are talking donkeys in some of these worlds and unicorns in others. According to Lewis, we, all of us, every day in our ordinary lives, are talking about creatures from other worlds. When you're contemplating the possibility that you might have had different friends, or family, or a different career, you are thinking about someone else in one of those island universes, a real-life doppelgänger, someone like you except for the fact that they have different friends, a different family or a different career.Lewis raised plenty of eyebrows saying this; famously many philosophers just stared back incredulously. But analytic philosophy wasn't the same afterwards. He had opened the door to metaphysical speculation in the grand manner long out of fashion; visions of reality no less sweeping than his own soon became the order of the day. How did Lewis bring about this paradigm shift even though nobody agreed with him? Why does the Age of Metaphysical Revolution he inaugurated with these extraordinary claims continue today, and, for all expectations, tomorrow? The short answer is that the lines of history ran through Lewis. Lewis had rediscovered metaphysics between science and commonsense. His own intellectual journey had taken him from Oxford, where he learnt respect for commonsense and ordinary language, tutored by Iris Murdoch and lectured by Strawson, to Harvard, where he imbibed Quine's systematic, science-driven philosophy. Later Lewis was a frequent visitor to Australia where Smart's and Armstrong's forays into materialistic metaphysics had prepared the way for him. Lewis's mature philosophy was extraordinary for being a synthesis of all these influences. He conceived the goal of philosophy to be achieving a balance between science and commonsense. Lewis held metaphysics to be respectable insofar as metaphysics results from the endeavour to capture commonsense and science together in one encompassing theoretical net. He inspired a generation of philosophers to do metaphysics because even though most didn't believe in talking donkeys (so they didn't think he had got the balance right), Lewis wasn't authoritarian. He left everyone at liberty to do their own metaphysics: Lewis left each of us to judge when we have achieved a balance between these forces, a matter for every philosopher to square with her own intellectual conscience.Lewis was famous not only for his published writings but also his dynamic engagement with philosophers worldwide, evinced by his correspondence with over a thousand of them during his career. His widow, Stephanie Lewis, has given us access to his philosophical correspondence and other posthumous papers. By making this remarkable historical resource available for the first time, she has provided us with a unique opportunity to retrace her husband's intellectual journey from neophyte to metaphysical visionary. A major task of our project will be to select from the thousands of pages of letters between Lewis and his interlocutors the most revealing ones, and edit this material for publication, making it available to future generations of philosophers and historians of philosophy. But understanding what makes this or that exchange revealing is bound up with comprehending the genesis of our current metaphysical age. So our tandem aim will be to write the first ever history of late 20th-century analytic philosophy that explains our Age of Metaphysical Revolution.