David Lewis was an American philosopher whose technically sophisticated work on modality, possible worlds, and metaphysics helped legitimise the return of metaphysical inquiry within analytic philosophy after the collapse of logical positivism.
Modal realism and possible worlds
Lewis is best known for his defence of modal realism—the view that possible worlds are just as real as the actual world. According to Lewis, when we say something is “possibly true,” we mean it’s true in some possible world, and these worlds exist concretely rather than as abstract entities or linguistic constructions.
This controversial position provided a systematic framework for analysing:
- Modal claims (necessity and possibility)
- Counterfactual conditionals (“if X had happened, Y would have resulted”)
- Properties and propositions
- Content and meaning
Normalising metaphysics within capitalist realism
By the 1970s and 1980s, Lewis’s work—alongside Kripke’s development of modal logic—normalised modal notions and enabled a resurgence of metaphysics that would have been unthinkable to earlier logical positivists. This revival occurred within the insulated, professionalised, and politically quietistic environment that analytic philosophy had built for itself during the Cold War period.
The metaphysics that returned through Lewis’s work was not speculative cosmology but a highly technical, model-theoretic enterprise—one compatible with analytic philosophy’s commitment to formal precision and apparent political neutrality. Crucially, this metaphysical revival posed no threat to existing power structures. Questions about possible worlds, modal realism, and counterfactuals remained safely abstract, never interrogating the actual world’s political economy or the material conditions enabling such philosophical work.
This represents a paradigmatic case of how analytic philosophy could appear to expand its scope (returning to traditional metaphysical questions) whilst maintaining its political quietism. The professional philosopher could engage with grand questions about reality itself without ever examining the institutional, economic, and political structures sustaining their own intellectual labour.
Legacy
Lewis’s influence extends across metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. His work demonstrated how analytic philosophy could engage with traditionally metaphysical questions using the formal tools and technical rigour that had become disciplinary norms.