David Lewis
Princeton
26 May 1990

"I am an old fashioned analytic metaphysician, in pursuit of hypotheses about what things are the elements of being, and about how all else may be reduced to patterns of these elements. I am notorious for claiming that these elements must include many that are merely possible, no part of this world that we ourselves live in, but none the worse for that. Apart from that, I am philosophically conservative: I think philosophy cannot credibly challenge either the positive convictions of common sense or the established theses of the natural sciences and mathematics".