Lewis and the Identity Theory

Abstract

This chapter presents Armstrong’s last paper on philosophy of mind, where he recounts the origins of David Lewis’s seminal paper ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory’ which appeared in 1966, two years before Armstrong’s book. Armstrong situates Lewis’s theory in relation to his own theory and in so doing adds an important seam to the familiar narrative of how the causal theory of mind emerged in the years immediately after the publication of A Materialist Theory of the Mind. The historiography, created and propagated by Armstrong himself, has always rightly emphasized the priority of U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart, but until now there has not been such a detailed account from Armstrong himself of Lewis’s ‘causal role’ in the first wave of thinking about the mind.