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David Lewis, ‘Desire as Conditional Belief’, unpublished note dated August 1988.

I believe that the only surviving copy of this five-page note is the one in my personal files, reproduced here. In particular this note is not to be found in the official collection of Lewis’s papers held at the Princeton University Library.

David Lewis mailed a copy of this note to me at Monash University in Melbourne in August 1988. I believe he was in New Zealand at the time, without access to his word processor, which explains why it is hand-written. Another copy went to Huw Price. We don’t know who else might have received it. David was responding to a draft version of what became Huw’s paper ‘Defending Desire-as-Belief’, published in Mind in 1989.

In February 2025, Huw Price, who had been looking unsuccessfully for this note, first among his own papers and then in the Lewis collection at Princeton, contacted me on the off-chance that I might remember it. I did, and I found it for him in one of my file cabinets.

Huw and I felt that the note should be made public, despite the request at the top of the first page: “For limited circulation. Please don’t cite or recopy.” The note is much more like a piece of correspondence than a draft paper. Two volumes of Lewis’s Philosophical Letters have been published by Oxford University Press, in 2021 and 2022, published by Helen Beebee and A.R.J. Fisher. David Lewis’s literary estate was dissolved once all legal matters had been taken care of, and there is no longer a literary executor from whom we might ask permission to make this public. Helen Beebee and Ant Fisher agreed that we should just go ahead and make it public.

I will be happy to donate the physical copy I have to the Lewis archive at Princeton Library, if they want it.

Jessica Collins
March 16, 2025