The Late Papers of C. I. Lewis

Notes and Discussions THE LATE PAPERS OF C. I. LEWIS C. I. LEwis1 was one of the most indomitable, intransigent, and gifted philosophers of our time, surely a pragmatist, perhaps the greatest, but one never really in the pocket of any school or technique. His life was given to our discipline, and his endowments and energies produced substantial contributions in several fields, notably logic, epistemology, and axiology. His work was placed squarely where he wanted it, regardless of the compelling milieu of our day, and I think we might say that he was one of those rare philosophers among us whose contemporaries included such men as Hume and Kant. Lewis, like many of our older philosophers , lived to see philosophy, for better or worse, profitably or not, turning away from the world of experience, forsaking its role of hazarding an intelligible picture of reality, forsaking its classical responsibility to risk answers to old questions. All this is oversimple, as is almost anything else one could say, but there is little doubt that philosophy has, in the past several years, undergone a transformation which has brought to some philosophers, Lewis among them, regret , sometimes bitterness. Most keenly, Lewis was disappointed in current trends in ethics and saw noncognitivism as a dangerously wrongheaded, if not absurd, falsification of moral facts. In his final years, Lewis turned his energies to the analysis of moral phenomena , hastening under the burdens of age and illness to fulfill a sadly longpostponed commitment, one antedating even his An Analysis o] Knowledge and Valuation. He never lived to fulfill this commitment, and his shelves, when he died, were lined with dozens of notebooks, containing innumerable drafts and studies for his final work, a major contribution to ethics. Two smaller books were drawn from these studies: The Ground and Nature o] the Right (Columbia University Press, 1955) and Our Social Inheritance (Indiana University Press, 1957). On the other hand, neither of these books constitutes more than a fragment of Lewis' thinking in this area. There are approximately 9,500 pages of handscript in the most recent notebooks, the substantial majority of which is devoted to the projected work on ethics. The Lewis Materials are likely to be a mine for several years, in which all picks and shovels are welcome. It seems to me that any attempt to present an adequate survey of the materials would amount to little more than a Homeric catalog of ships and captains . Accordingly, it is the purpose of this article to present only a sketch of certain of the dominant themes and claims of the late work and to discuss, in a somewhat general way, what Lewis was up to and how he was going about it. The article is divided into three sections; the first contains some general remarks on the papers; the second consists of capsule characterizations of segments of the materials which, in my opinion, are particularly relevant to the book; and the 1Professor Lange has been working on the Lewis Papers for several months, assisting Professors Charles A. Baylis and William K. Frankena. [235] 236 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY third is an attempt to give a unified impression of the substance of the late papers. Although, as will be clear, there is much in the papers which deserves argumentative consideration, this article, at least, will be determinedly expositional . Critical discussions--and the Lewis Papers are certain to provoke them-will be more appropriate when portions of the papers have found their way into print. I. Background Remarks The final work of Dr. Lewis was to have been addressed to the general intellectual public, to thinking, worrying individuals wherever they might be found. To them, as a philosopher and fellow being, he wanted to talk. I think this is important when considering the final papers, to remember that they were not devised to dot the journals of our discipline, to lapse into oblivion with the next issue. Accordingly, their crispness, their occasional animus, their frequent insistence on sticking to the centers of arguments and positions make sense. On the other hand, whereas the nonphilosophical intellectual will undoubtedly profit from Lewis' ideas, that is, find them instructive and provocative, there is little...