I remember studying Naming And Necessity in my undergrad and being blown away by the clarity of his arguments. It is an amazing skill to express oneself so concisely, and many of his arguments/thought experiments have a 'commonsense' quality to them that make them very persuasive.. By contrast other great philosophers of language like Wittgenstein had the insight but somewhat struggled to express it.
I don't entirely agree with some elements of Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein (I'm more partial to the Baker and Hacker position), but he was so important to keeping Witty in the discussion that it's hard to not give him enormous credit.
As an aside, it is very interesting how many writers on Wittgenstein, and working in what we might broadly call Ordinary Language philosophy, achieve such a startling clarity. An early example (even before Wittgenstein) is also RG Collingwood. His writing is straightforward and clear as day, eschewing jargon for the language we use day to day, for that was ultimately their focus. They wanted to dissolve philosophical problems.
I would add HP Grice to the list of startlingly clear ordinary language philosophers. His 1957 essay "Meaning" has this definition:
"A means something by x" is equivalent to "A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention".
It may seem less than clear taken out of context, but there is a wonderful argument working toward the definition and once he finally presents it, it's a bit of a mic drop moment.
Also, he is one of the few philosophers whose work proved to be foundational in linguistics. Any book/course in pragmatics will talk about Grice's work on implicature and background knowledge.
His book The Principles of Art from 1938 is probably the best example. He offers a definition of art arrived at through ordinary language philosophy, and, along the way, also develops a theory of imagination, language, and anti-copyright.
His teaching at Cambridge often had minutes-long silences, in which the class just had to wait for him to conclude his thoughts and resume teaching. It was apparently agonizing for some of his students.
Especially since you probably didn't want to step on his toes by breaking the silence while he still held the floor - he was, after all, forced to retire from schoolteaching after beating one of his slower math students unconscious.
"The Haidbauer incident, known in Austria as der Vorfall Haidbauer, took place in April 1926 when Josef Haidbauer, an 11-year-old schoolboy in Otterthal, Austria, reportedly collapsed unconscious after being hit on the head during class by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein."
While writing the Tractatus in the trenches, even. Most people would be satisfied with a stream-of-consciousness brain dump, hoping that enough insights are contained within to justify one's work. Wittgenstein cooked it down to just seven terse statements and further terse sub-statements. And numbered them nicely. Who does that?
A philosopher at my alma mater wrote a controversial paper accusing Kripke of plagiarism. I'm not competent to weigh in on that question, but I thought this article was interesting: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html
Jim Holt's writing was gripping, read the whole affair. But now I'm left thinking that all this analysis of names is silly, and they are heavily overloaded and turing complete. Why even try to box them as something related to possible universes?
When I was right out of college I worked with a guy who had a PhD in philosophy and had studied Kripke closely. He was working in software at the time because it’s hard to make a living as a philosopher. He gave me one of his extra copies of Naming and Necessity. I had never read any philosophy and I was amazed.
> He was working in software at the time because it’s hard to make a living as a philosopher.
Yeah, there are a lot of us. Spend a few years deeply studying logic and reasoning, and programming really just feels like a different version of the same thing.
Learning an algorithm is very similar to learning an argument or a proof, and designing algorithms is very similar to designing arguments.
I did a Philosophy/CS double major for undergrad. I work as an SRE now, but when I was in school there was one other student in my cohort who was also doing the same pairing, she intended to go work on machine ethics last I heard.
There really are a number of delightful intersections between the two subjects and I have considered writing a book on them,“Philosophy for Computer Scientists” or perhaps “Computer Science for Philosophers” :)
Good Lord I wish more people understood which elements of RDBs are essential features of the logic they’re based on; which ones are results of the way the relational model screwed up the logic it was supposed to be based on (hello there, Closed World Assumption); which ones are results of the way SQL screwed up the relational model; and which ones are just elements of a performance and security model that is quite independent of the logic (eg. there’s nothing in the logic which dictates that adding a row is routine but adding a table is a Big Deal). It probably doesn’t qualify as a delightful subject, but it would be a great service if someone could explain this stuff to people.
An influential and astonishing mind. Reading him in my 20s really changed my relationship with language. I owe him a debt as he changed my professional life.
Yet nothing I've seen in the press has described his predation of women in the department. In fact I learned of it only later when speaking with female linguists.
I heard him speak once and could have gone and spoken with him but turned down the opportunity. I'm male, but why should I then be so lucky to be able to have an ordinary conversation with him?
I know we're not supposed to talk about comment voting but I am disturbed that this on-topic comment was downvoted.
His attitude towards women was notorious, and he didn't work with any as far as I know. I consider it's as much worth discussion as Heidegger's or Sartre's politics.
Didn't down vote, but a possible reason for doing that would be that "his predation of women in the department" is accusatory but vague. It speaks ill of Kripke, but if you disagree with the statement there's no point in replying to it because the statement itself basically isn't refutable.
Thanks. I think it's reasonable to ask an epistemic question about such an assertion. People sometimes respond with a single-word comment, "Source?", which sparks such a thread. Despite its brevity I (and apparently most HN readers) consider it a substantive comment.
In the case of my GP comment, I mentioned how I learned of it with that in mind. In my case, still hearsay of course.
Recently been reading up on model checking, and Kripke structures are mentioned often. They are somewhat similar to Labeled Transition Systems, but then with propositions on the nodes instead of labels on the edges. Turns out they are named after this person, fascinating.
I went to a Philosophy conference with a professor friend in the early 2000s. I was standing in a circle talking to about 10 professors. All 10 had some anecdote of Kripke's brilliance with a few questioning why even stay in the field when you could never get to his level.
Now maybe we can finally get our hands on the unpublished work!
(This is a joke, but something I used to hear in philosophy is that kripke felt some of his drafts were “not ready” despite circulating since the 70’s. The John Locke lectures are an example, I believe.)
From one of the obits I learned the Locke lectures were finally published in 2013! In the early 2000s our prof handed out what I believe were a former colleague’s xeroxed notes from them.
A true genius of the sort that might come around every hundred years. I look forward to his literary estate going through his hundreds of boxes worth of papers and manuscripts and notes and publishing them over the next few decades.
It is very odd that the New York Times hasn't published an obit for him. Maybe they will take some time to do so but I always thought that they had these things pre-baked.
I heard about his death elsewhere this morning and was surprised I didn't see it before. They have a ton of obits for less consequential people.
