Blackwell Reference Online

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C. I. Lewis was the foremost systematic American thinker of his time. After John Dewey (see Dewey), he was the nation's leading pragmatist during the middle portion of the twentieth century, and he was the modern founder of modal logic. While at Harvard, Lewis trained a whole generation of American philosophers, in whose writings, and his own, his influence lives on.Clarence Irving Lewis was born on April 12, 1883, in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Although the Lewis family was poor and he had to work throughout his youth, he made an excellent record at Haverhill High School, and was able to enter Harvard in 1902. Lewis's chief interest was philosophy, which he studied under William James (see James) and Josiah Royce, the latter becoming his ideal of a philosopher. Upon graduating, he took a job at the University of Colorado teaching English, and married his high school sweetheart, Mabel Maxwell Graves. He returned to Harvard in 1908 to do graduate work, where he worked chiefly with Royce and Ralph Barton Perry. Upon receiving his doctorate in 1910, he took a position at the University of California at Berkeley where he stayed for ten years.As a student at Harvard, Lewis had been captivated by Immanuel Kant, and by Royce, to whose views he thought his own similar. But Perry convinced him that idealistic metaphysics was the result of mistaking a regulative principle for a constitutive ... log in or subscribe to read full text