Lewis on Implication

C. I. Lewis was a leading figure in Harvard’s Department of Philosophy when I was a graduate student there in the middle of the past century. Tall, dignified, and reserved in manner, he stood as a link with the golden age of Harvard philosophy.1 He could be kindly and genial, but did not hesitate to express disapproval upon occasion. Although he had been unwell and was nearing the end of his career at Harvard, he continued to be admired by students, and his courses were well received. In his teaching he did not try to entertain with anecdotes or digressions, but kept to the subject at hand. He concentrated on what he found most valuable in the views of thinkers he treated, skirting the intricacies of their arguments when these did not impress him favorably. I heard him lecture to sizeable classes on Kant, on epistemology, and on social ethics, and I attended a seminar of his on ethics. In the seminar he read each time from manuscript he had been preparing, afterwards inviting questions. In his lectures, though, he talked fluently, using few notes, and often rose to a spirited pitch of enthusiasm about, say, Kant’s account of apperception. Usually his lectures were held on the first floor of Emerson Hall in a modest classroom which I believe had been Royce’s. The room had a small blackboard on the west wall behind a podium and pulpit-like lectern from which the lecturer rather towered over those sitting on the old-fashioned benches below. Lewis had a monocle which he fixed in his right eye when he occasionally read aloud from a text, but when he finished reading he would relax his right brow and let the monocle drop; new students could be startled by this maneuver, expecting the monocle to fall and shatter, but it was saved by the black ribbon attached to it and to a bead behind his ear. Lewis on Implication