Eric says below that "Lewis is arguably the most significant and influential (analytical) philosopher of the last quarter of the 20th century. (Perhaps, Deleuze is the only contemporary that will match his enduring significance..."
Now putting Lewis and Deleuze together would yield very interesting metaphysical work I think. Unfortunately, there's a high barrier to entry to this kind of comparative work in terms of the time commitments necessary to get even a baseline acquaintance with each philosopher. So there has been only a very few attempts I can find to bring them together. Here is a New APPS post by Jeff Bell (and another); there is also Ch 6 in this book by James Williams (pdf here). Williams begins:
For Gilles Deleuze, the virtual is real and no actual world is complete if considered in abstraction from the virtual. For David Lewis, possible worlds are real and the actual world is but one of many real possible worlds. Deleuze is critical of the concept of the possible, warning against any confusion of the possible with the virtual. Lewis’s arguments can be deployed against many of the assumptions that hold for Deleuze’s virtual – most notably, against the claim that the reality of the virtual is a certainty, rather than merely a useful supposition.
Given these strong oppositions, is there any productive interchange available between the two positions? Or, do they stand for ways of doing philosophy that are so far removed that they have little to offer one another? Even if they can be related, will this relation be one of rapid dismissive arguments, where one or other premise is rejected as too far-fetched (for example, that the virtual is real but inaccessible to direct knowledge or that reality can be thought-of adequately in terms of properties)?
It is true that Adrian Moore's The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge, 2011) includes chapters on Lewis and Deleuze, but I don't recall from my reading of Moore that they are directly related. If anyone knows of other treatments of Deleuze and Lewis together, please let me know here in comments or by email.
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