Hello everyone. I am Joshua Spencer. I’m a co-administrator of this blog along with the far more technologically adept Elle Benjamin. I wanted to let you know how this project got started and how I hope this project will proceed.

So, about a month or so ago my friend and colleague, Stan Husi, was waxing appreciatively about the greatness of David Lewis and suggested that we read all of Lewis’s works from beginning to end. I thought that this was a daunting task and said so. But, Stan absorbed my objection with a smile and, being a metaphysician, I couldn’t really resist the opportunity to read Lewis with someone.

We made plans to begin in the summer but, after a few days of reflection, I started to get cold feet. I thought that a slightly larger project with wider participation might motivate me to stick with the readings. So, I took a very scientific poll on Facebook to find out who might be interested in taking part in a non-localized Lewis reading group accompanied by a blog. There seemed to be some interest. So, with a lot of help from Elle, this is the result.

I’d like to keep the blog fairly informal. Elle suggested that, for each reading, we ask a volunteer to briefly summarize the reading and initiate the discussion for the week. If you’d like to volunteer to be the summarizer and discussion initiator for a particular paper, please let us know. In other respects, I think we should let the blog develop rather organically. The blog might, for example, be a good forum for new ideas and research related to Lewis’s work. If you have a relevant paper or idea you’d like to post, please feel free to do so. Finally, I hope that the blog won’t be too much work for anyone. If there are enough people who are willing to post once in a while, then none of us should be overly burdened by the blog.

I’ll post a summary of the first article, “A New Argument for Identity Theory”, tomorrow. Anyone who has something to say about that article is welcome to comment on my post or write their own post during the upcoming week. We’ll read one paper or book chapter each week for the foreseeable future. You can find a nice calendar and schedule of readings at the top of the blog. In order to keep the blog operational during this early period, I will post summaries and initiate the discussion for any papers for which we have no volunteer summarizer (at least I’ll do so during the first month of so).

I’d like to thank Elle Benjamin for volunteering to be my co-administrator and for designing and setting up the blog. She’s been doing a lot of the early work for this blog, for which I am very appreciative. Thanks, also, to Mark Barber for setting up a Facebook page related to the blog. If anyone has any suggestions for the overall project or for the blog in particular, please let us know. Thanks for joining us. I look forward to our discussions.