Kripke, Saul Aaron (1940–)

Saul Kripke is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. He is also one of the leading mathematical logicians, having done seminal work in areas including modal logic, intuitionistic logic and set theory. Although much of his work in logic has philosophical significance, it will not be discussed here.

Kripke’s main contributions fall in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of logic and mathematics. He is particularly well known for his views on and discussions of the following topics: the concepts of necessity, identity and ‘possible worlds’; ‘essentialism’ – the idea that things have significant essential properties; the question of what determines the referent of an ordinary proper name and the related question of whether such names have meanings; the relations among the concepts of necessity, analyticity, and the a priori; the concept of belief and its problems; the concept of truth and its problems; and scepticism, the idea of following a rule, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’. This entry will be confined to the topics of identity, proper names, necessity and essentialism.