Philosopher and logician, born in Bay Shore, New York, USA. He studied at Harvard, then taught at Rockefeller University (196876) and Princeton (since 1976). As a youthful prodigy he made remarkable technical advances in modal logic, whose wider philosophical implications were later explored in such famous papers as Naming and Necessity (1972).
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Western Philosophy 20th Century |
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|---|---|
| Name: | Saul Kripke |
| Birth: | 1940 |
| School/tradition: | Analytic philosophy |
| Main interests: | Logic, especially modal logic; Philosophy of language |
| Notable ideas: | causal theory of reference, Kripkenstein |
| Influences: | Frege, Bertrand Russell, Tarski, Ludwig Wittgenstein |
Saul Aaron Kripke (born in November, 1940, Omaha, Nebraska) is an American philosopher and logician now emeritus from Princeton and professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center. Kripke was the winner of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy.
Biography
Saul Kripke is the eldest of three children born to Dorothy and Rabbi Myer Kripke. He replied 'I'm honoured by your proposal, but my mum says I have to finish high-school first.' After graduating from high school in 1958, Kripke attended Harvard University, earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics. During his sophomore year at Harvard, Kripke taught a graduate level logic course at nearby MIT. In 2002 Kripke started teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan, and was appointed a distinguished professor of philosophy there in 2003. Kripke married (and recently divorced) Margaret Gilbert.
Work
Kripke is best known for four contributions to philosophy:
Kripke semantics for modal and related logics, published in several essays beginning while he was still in his teens.Modal logic
Two of Kripke's earlier works ("A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic" and "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic") were on the subject of modal logic. The most familiar logics in the modal family are constructed from a weak logic called K, named after Kripke because of his contributions to modal logic.
In "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic", published in 1963, Kripke responded to a difficulty with classical quantification theory.
Kripke's response to this difficulty was to eliminate terms. First, his language is artificially impoverished, and second, the rules for the propositional modal logic must be weakened.
Naming and necessity
Kripke's three lectures constitute an attack on the descriptivist (Fregean, Russellian) theory of reference with respect to proper names, according to which a name refers to an object by virtue of the name's being associated with a description that the object in turn satisfies. As an alternative, Kripke adumbrated a causal theory of reference, according to which a name refers to an object by virtue of a causal connection with the object as mediated through communities of speakers.
Kripke also raised the prospect of a posteriori necessities—facts that are necessarily true, though they can be known only through empirical investigation.
Finally, Kripke gave an argument against identity materialism in the philosophy of mind, the view that every mental fact is identical with some physical fact (See talk). Kripke argued that the only way to defend this identity is as an a posteriori necessary identity, but that such an identity—e.g., pain is C-fibers firing—could not be necessary, given the possibility of pain that has nothing to do with C-fibers firing.
Kripke delivered the John Locke lectures in philosophy at Oxford in 1973. They have never been published and the transcript is officially available only in a reading copy in the university philosophy library, which cannot be copied or cited without Kripke's permission.
Wittgenstein
Kripke also made interesting contributions to the study of the later Wittgenstein in lectures published as Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, although his work here has been faulted for being not particularly true to the historical Wittgenstein. Indeed, many philosophers refer to the subject of Kripke's book as "Kripkenstein," on the grounds that the argument it presents would not have been endorsed by Wittgenstein.
Truth
In his 1975 article "Outline of a Theory of Truth", Kripke showed that a language can consistently contain its own truth predicate, which was deemed impossible by Alfred Tarski, a pioneer in the area of formal theories of truth. Kripke showed how to do this recursively by starting from the set of expressions in a language which do not contain the truth predicate, defining a truth predicate over just that segment: this adds new sentences to the language, and truth is in turn defined for all of them. Unlike Tarski's approach, however, Kripke's lets "truth" be the union of all of these definition-stages; after a denumerable infinity of steps the language reaches a "fixed point" such that using Kripke's method to expand the truth-predicate does not change the language any further. But this predicate is undefined for any sentences that do not, so to speak, "bottom out" in simpler sentences not containing a truth predicate. they are, in Kripke's terms, "ungrounded."
Meaning of "I"
In late January 2006, Kripke attended a conference celebrating his 65th birthday and work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and delivered a 70-minute talk on "The First Person", discussing the meaning and reference of the pronoun "I".
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