Carnap’s Second Aufbau and David Lewis’s Aufbau

Abstract

There is a deep continuity between central projects of Rudolf Carnap and David Lewis: Carnap’s logical construction of the world in Der logische Aufbau der Welt and Lewis’s program of vindicating Humean supervenience through conceptual analysis. Carnap promised but never wrote a second volume of his Aufbau, using a physical basis in place of the phenomenal basis he had used in the first Aufbau. Even using tools available to him at the time, Carnap’s physicalist construction would have been a viable philosophical project; but Lewis’s program delivers a more sophisticated construction in the same spirit. A Carnap-Lewis Aufbau thus constitutes a philosophically viable blueprint for the world.