I’m (slowly) writing the entry on David Lewis for the Stanford Encyclopaedia. Here’s the tentative table of contents.

1. Convention and Linguistic Meaning
2. Counterfactuals
3. Philosophy of Mind

<Humean Supervenience

4. Modal Metaphysics
5. Everything Else

The last section could do with a snappier title. But the idea is that I start with the two early books, and the papers that build directly on those books (esp “Languages and Language” and “Time’s Arrow”). Then I look at what I think of as the three big themes of Lewis’s career. These are (a) his theory of mind, (b) his reductionism about the nomic (and related topics), (c) modal realism and its consequences for metaphysics, especially modal metaphysics.

The problem is that this leaves out quite a lot. For instance, it leaves out practically everything from “Papers in Philosophical Logic” and “Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy”. But I do think that trying to find another theme on a par with those three would amount to shoehorning material into a category in which it doesn’t quite fit. (Not that the three themes are entirely distinct.)

But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t say anything about the rest of Lewis’s career. So I was wondering what I should focus on outside those five sections. To that end, I made a crude search on Google Scholar of which were Lewis’s most cited papers. The full results are below the fold, but the top 15 is a little surprising.

Note that the “II” in “Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities” is misleading. Google Scholar thinks that the two papers with roughly this title are just one paper, and it has merged their citations together.

That the books are up top is no surprise. Books generally do much better than papers on Google Scholar. And it isn’t a surprise to some extent that older papers lead the way. They have more time to collect citations. But the showing of the language papers, and in particular the formal semantics papers, is quite stunning. I think I follow Lewis, and Lewisiania, quite a bit, and I can’t recall the last time I saw someone cite “General Semantics”, for instance. So maybe this isn’t the best measure of the importance and influence of the various works.

Full table, and methodology, below the fold.

The trick with searching for Lewis on Google Scholar is that you want to find all of his papers, but you also don’t want the millions of papers written by people called “Lewis” in. My trick was to fix author as “D Lewis”, and have a long disjunction of keywords that it was required to find one of. It’s highly likely that in doing this I’ve left out some prominent papers. The actual search is “here”:.http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22d+lewis%22+philosophy+OR+philosophical+OR+chance+OR+subjective+OR+language+OR+counterfactual+OR+conditional+OR+princeton+OR+metaphysics+OR+epistemology+author%3Ad-lewis&btnG=Search&num=100&hl=en&lr=. I then got rid of the non-David Lewis papers, and sorted the remainder by citation count. The full table is below. I’ve cut off the list just after the end of the first page, there are several other papers with a dozen or so citations, but from here on it is very hard to separate the papers from the mis-citations.