Lewis

I was looking at “Peter King’s website”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/mystuff.html, especially his book “One Hundred Philosophers”:http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.asp?productid=160490 and I thought this passage on “David Lewis”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/authors/david.lewis.html was delightful.

bq. Lewis’ philosophical interests were broad, as evidenced by the contents of the five volumes of his collected papers published so far: ethics, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, language – he wrote on a vast range of subjects, from holes to worlds, from Anselm to Mill, from the mind to time travel. In everything he wrote he was rigorous, committed, and clear, but perhaps the most distinctive thing about him was his attitude to other philosophers, and especially to criticism: _one can scarcely find a book or paper attacking Lewis’ views that doesn’t contain an acknowledgement to him for his help_. What mattered to him – what he loved – were the ideas, the arguments, the philosophy, not winning or being right. He was the ideal, the model philosopher; he’s also (and this is a very different matter) widely regarded as being the best philosopher of his generation – perhaps of the twentieth century. (Emphasis added.)

The model philosopher indeed.