Person: Lewis, Clarence Irving
Clarence Lewis was an American philosopher and logician.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- In 1897 Bradford was annexed to Haverhill and, after that, Lewis attended Haverhill High School.
- Lewis had met Mabel Maxwell Graves (born 19 May 1884, died 18 April 1987) at Haverhill High School.
- In 1902 Lewis graduated from Haverhill High School and entered Harvard.
- After graduating, Lewis was appointed as an instructor in English at the University of Colorado.
- Lewis returned to Harvard in autumn 1908 to study for his Ph.D. advised by Ralph Barton Perry (1876-1957) but he was greatly influenced by Josiah Royce (1855-1916) who could not be his official supervisor since he had recently retired.
- Lewis took courses which discussed the work of George Boole, Georg Cantor, William Clifford, Louis Couturat, Richard Dedekind, Hermann von Helmholtz, David Hilbert, Edward Huntington, Alfred Kempe, Leopold Kronecker, Christine Ladd-Franklin, Hugh MacCall, Charles Peirce, Henri Poincaré, Bertrand Russell, and Ernst Schröder.
- In 1911 Lewis was appointed as an Instructor at the University of California at Berkeley and he was promoted to assistant professor three years later in 1914.
- Professor Lewis has written a work that completely bridges over the gap between the old and the new.
- In 1920 Lewis returned to Harvard when he was appointed as a Lecturer.
- When Ralph Perry retired from the Edgar Pierce Chair in Philosophy at Harvard in 1946, Lewis was named Edgar Pierce Professor.
- The treatment has the originality and technical expertness which have marked Lewis' earlier publications, and the book is undoubtedly one of the major modern contributions to basic philosophical theory.
- There are many places where greater terseness would have given more psychological punch to Lewis' contentions.
- William Tuthill Parry (1908-1988), who received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1932 with a thesis supervised by Alfred North Whitehead, attended lectures by Lewis.
- Many a graduate student who came to Harvard's philosophy department because of the repute of the University, the department, or some more famous professor, found the most lasting impression was that made by Lewis.
- After retiring from Harvard, Lewis spent one year lecturing at Princeton and then went to live in Menlo Park, California.
- Among the honours that Lewis received we mention his honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1941, the Butler gold medal from Columbia University in 1950, and the $10,000 prize for scholarship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1961.
- In his last years Lewis suffered from a heart complaint which eventually led to his death.
Born 12 April 1883, Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA. Died 3 February 1964, Menlo Park, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
