Why Not Lewis?

and thought, Murray Murphey diligently tests his subject’s philosophical claims against both their own standards and rival positions advanced during Lewis’s lifetime. Murphey does not spare his criticisms where he deems Lewis to have been inconsistent or unconvincing. At the same time, he offers penetrating and sympathetic insights into Lewis’s reformulation of pragmatist philosophy, along with a spirited defence of his subject’s work against the attacks of contemporaries in the logical positivist and Quinean camps. Given this thorough handling of Lewis’s intellectual biography, it is all the more curious that Murphey does not explicitly justify his claim that Lewis was “the last great pragmatist” until the very end of the book. And when he does, there are good reasons—many offered by the author himself in earlier chapters—for disputing Murphey’s case and denying Lewis elevation to the canon of Great Pragmatists. A principal reason why Lewis merits renewed consideration, according to Murphey, is that he was “one of the few” philosophers “trained for the issues of the nineteenth century” who “could deal effectively with the very different issues of the 1940s and 1950s” (405). Murphey illustrates very well how Lewis’s postdoctoral affinities with Roycean idealism gave way to the “conceptual pragmatism” of Mind and the World Order—a shift mediated by Lewis’s engagement with the mathematical logic of Russell and his followers. Lewis was also open to, if ultimately highly critical of, the logical positivists who came to play an increasing role in American philosophy during the 1930s. Yet this is the same Lewis who, Murphey avers, “found himself outflanked” by Quine’s attack on the empiricist dogma of reductionism in the early 1950s precisely because he was unable to Why Not Lewis?