Naming and Necessity

Name: Naming and Necessity
Author: Saul Kripke

by Saul Kripke

Kripke's landmark work on names and necessity, arguing proper names are rigid designators, not descriptions

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About the author

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.

More by Saul Kripke

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