1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Saul Kripke

Saul Kripke Quotes

Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emeritus professor at Princeton University. Since the 1960s, Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, modal logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy.

Kripke has made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic. His work has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy; his principal contribution is a semantics for modal logic involving possible worlds, now called Kripke semantics. Another of his most important contributions is his argument that necessity is a "metaphysical" notion that should be separated from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary truths that are a posteriori truths, such as that water is H2O. He has also contributed an original reading of Wittgenstein, referred to as "Kripkenstein." A 1970 Princeton lecture series, published in book form in 1980 as Naming and Necessity, is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century.



Wikipedia  

✵ 13. November 1940
Saul Kripke photo

Works
Naming and Necessity
Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke: 3   quotes 0   likes

Famous Saul Kripke Quotes

“So even if I should say to myself that I will use 'Hesperus' to name the heavenly body I see in the evening in yonder position of the sky, it will not be necessary that Hesperus was ever seen in the evening. But it may be a priori in that this is how I have determined the referent.”

Saul Kripke book Naming and Necessity

Naming and Necessity (1980, p. 291)
Context: If I use the name 'Hesperus' to refer to a certain planetary body when seen in a certain celestial position in the evening, it will not therefore be a necessary truth that Hesperus is ever seen in the evening. That depends on various contingent facts about people being there to see and things like that. So even if I should say to myself that I will use 'Hesperus' to name the heavenly body I see in the evening in yonder position of the sky, it will not be necessary that Hesperus was ever seen in the evening. But it may be a priori in that this is how I have determined the referent.

“We are not at the moment searching for the correct scheme.”

Saul Kripke

Philosophical Troubles (2011, p. 95)
Context: I am somewhat uncertain whether there is a definite factual question as to whether natural language handles truth-value gaps … Nor am I even quite sure that there is a definite question of fact as to whether natural language should be evaluated by the minimal fixed point or another, given the choice of a scheme for handling gaps. We are not at the moment searching for the correct scheme.

“It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong.”

Saul Kripke book Naming and Necessity

Naming and Necessity (1980, p. 64)

Similar authors

Ayn Rand photo
Ayn Rand 322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher
Martin Heidegger photo
Martin Heidegger 69
German philosopher
Paulo Freire photo
Paulo Freire 115
educator and philosopher
Emil M. Cioran photo
Emil M. Cioran 531
Romanian philosopher and essayist
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein 228
Austrian-British philosopher
Paul Valéry photo
Paul Valéry 89
French poet, essayist, and philosopher
Henri Bergson photo
Henri Bergson 18
French philosopher
George Santayana photo
George Santayana 109
20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with P…
Steven Weinberg photo
Steven Weinberg 46
American theoretical physicist
José Ortega Y Gasset photo
José Ortega Y Gasset 85
Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist