Saul Kripke
American philosopher whose Naming and Necessity revolutionized the philosophy of language by arguing against descriptivist theories of reference and introducing the notion of rigid designation. His lectures at Princeton in 1970 changed the direction of analytic philosophy. He also produced major work in modal logic.
Works
- Naming and NecessityKripke's landmark work on names and necessity, arguing proper names are rigid designators, not descriptions
- Wittgenstein on Rules and Private LanguageKripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein on rule-following, exploring the skeptical challenge to meaning itself
- Reference and ExistenceKripke's essays on names, necessity, and the metaphysics of existence and identity across possible worlds
- Philosophical TroublesCollection of Kripke's essays on language, logic, and metaphysics across decades of philosophical work
- Speaker's Reference and Semantic ReferenceKripke's analysis of the distinction between speaker reference and semantic reference in linguistic meaning