Saul Kripke

1940-2022 · American · Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind

Names are rigid designators: in every possible world they designate the same object.

In January 1970, a young Princeton lecturer stood up and gave three talks, without notes, that quietly overturned the reigning view of how language hooks onto the world. Transcribed and published as Naming and Necessity, they made Saul Kripke famous — though he had been a prodigy long before, publishing a completeness theorem for modal logic in a leading journal while still a Harvard undergraduate. He wrote slowly and published rarely, yet that slim body of work reorganized analytic philosophy.

Topics Saul Kripke addresses

• rigid designation
• the causal-historical theory of reference
• a posteriori necessity
• the contingent a priori
• possible worlds semantics
• the modal argument against descriptivism
• natural kind terms
• the Gödel/Schmidt example
• Hesperus is Phosphorus
• semantic externalism
• the Kripkenstein rule-following paradox
• essentialism
• the necessity of identity
• the necessity of origin
• theoretical identifications
• fixing the reference vs. giving the meaning
• the qua problem
• the puzzle about belief
• vacuous names
• the epistemic argument against descriptivism
• cluster theories of reference
• reference borrowing
• baptism and dubbing
• transworld identity

Converse with Saul Kripke on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Saul Kripke's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.