Department Was a Hot-house for Formal Semantics, with Colleagues Such as Rudolf

David Lewis was one of the most important philosophers of the 20 century working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. His corpus is extraordinary for its breadth of subject matter and for its systematicity. For both these reasons, it is difficult to do justice to his work in a short space—there are rich interconnections among his myriad writings, and numerous possible entry points. This article approaches Lewis and his work in three passes: first, a biographical tracing of his intellectual influences; second, a summary of his metaphilosophy; third, a survey of his more specific philosophical views, mostly following their order of conceptual dependence.