Kripke, Saul Aaron (1940–)

1. Life

Saul Kripke was born in Bay Shore, New York, the son of a rabbi and a teacher. The family soon moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where Kripke spent the rest of his childhood. At a very early age, he began to display prodigious mathematical ability and intense curiosity about philosophical questions. At the age of 15 he developed a semantics for quantified modal logic and his proof of the completeness of the semantics appeared in The Journal of Symbolic Logic when he was 18.

Kripke received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1962 and was appointed to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1963. There followed appointments as Lecturer at Princeton (1965 and 1966) and Harvard (1966–8). He was appointed Associate Professor at The Rockefeller University in 1968 (then Professor in 1972), and McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton in 1977, which is the position he currently holds. Kripke was the youngest person ever chosen to give the John Locke Lectures at Oxford (1973) and he has been the recipient of many prestigious honours and accolades.