Background

Saul Aaron Kripke was born on November 13, 1940, in Bay Shore, New York, United States to the family of Rabbi Myer Samuel Kripke and writer Dorothy Karp. The family soon moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where Kripke spent the rest of his childhood. His father was a Rabbi at the Conservative Jewish Beth El synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska and mother was an author of Jewish educational books. He grew up with two sisters, Madeline and Netta. He is the second cousin once removed of the television writer, director, and producer Eric Kripke.

Education

Saul Kripke studied at Dundee Grade School and at Omaha Central High School. By all accounts, he was a true prodigy. In the fourth grade, he discovered algebra, and by the end of grammar school, he had mastered geometry and calculus and taken up philosophy. While still a teenager he wrote a series of papers that eventually transformed the study of modal logic. One of them, or so the legend goes, earned a letter from the math department at Harvard, which hoped he would apply for a job until he wrote back and declined, explaining, "My mother said that I should finish high school and go to college first."

The college Saul eventually chose was Harvard. "I wish I could have skipped college," Kripke said in an interview. "I got to know some interesting people, but I can't say I learned anything. I probably would have learned it all anyway, just reading on my own." There, Kripke shared a dormitory room with constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe and, briefly, with Theodore Kaczynski, who would gain notoriety as "The Unabomber." While still a Harvard undergraduate, Kripke started teaching post-graduates down the street at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after getting his Bachelor of Science in 1962 didn't bother to acquire an advanced degree.

Career

Saul Kripke began his important work on the semantics of modal logic (the logic of modal notions such as necessity and possibility) while he was still a high-school student in Omaha, Nebraska. A groundbreaking paper from this period, "A Completeness Theorem for Modal Logic," was published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1959, during Kripke’s freshman year at Harvard University.

In 1962 Kripke graduated from Harvard and remained at Harvard until 1968, first as a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and then as a lecturer. During those years he continued a series of publications extending his original results in modal logic; he also published important papers in intuitionistic logic (the logic underlying the mathematical intuitionism of L.E.J. Brouwer), set theory, and the theory of transfinite recursion.

Kripke taught logic and philosophy at Rockefeller University from 1968 to 1976 and at Princeton University, as McCosh Professor of Philosophy, from 1976 until his retirement in 1998. In 1973 he delivered the prestigious John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford (published as Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures in 2013), and in 2001 he received the Rolf Schock Prize in logic and philosophy, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was appointed distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2003.

Although a prolific thinker and problem solver, Kripke chose to publish relatively few of his works. Nevertheless, some of his unpublished papers - on recursion theory, truth, the nature of logic, personal identity, the ontological nature of numbers, color and color terms, presupposition, and various paradoxes - have been influential through lectures, seminars, and informal circulation among colleagues and students. The first volume of his collected papers, including some previously unpublished works, was issued as Philosophical Troubles in 2011.

Achievements

• In many academic circles, Saul Kripke, who in 2001 was awarded the Schock Prize, philosophy's equivalent of the Nobel, is thought to be the world's greatest living philosopher, perhaps the greatest since Wittgenstein. Kripke is responsible for the influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic. His principal contribution is a semantics for modal logic involving possible worlds, now called Kripke semantics.
  
  In 2007, City University of New York established the Saul Kripke Center to serve as an archive of Kripke’s works, including manuscripts, lecture notes, and philosophical correspondence since the 1950s and recordings of his lectures and seminars since the 1970s.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, Volume 1

    (This important new book is the first of a series of volum...)

    2011
  • Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition

    (In this book, Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophic...)

    1982
  • Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures

    (Reference and Existence, Saul Kripke's John Locke Lecture...)

    2013
  • Naming and Necessity

    (Naming and Necessity has had a great and increasing influ...)

    1972

Religion

Kripke is Jewish, and he takes this seriously. He is not a nominal Jewish and he is careful keeping the Sabbath, for instance, he doesn't use public transportation on Saturdays.

Politics

Saul Kripke's political views aren't widely known.

Views

Kripke’s most important philosophical publication, Naming and Necessity (1980), based on transcripts of three lectures he delivered at Princeton in 1970, changed the course of analytic philosophy. It provided the first cogent account of necessity and possibility as metaphysical concepts, and it distinguished both concepts from the epistemological notions of a posteriori knowledge and a priori knowledge (knowledge acquired through experience and knowledge independent of experience, respectively) and from the linguistic notions of analytic truth and synthetic truth, or truth by virtue of meaning and truth by virtue of fact (see analytic proposition). In the course of making these distinctions, Kripke revived the ancient doctrine of essentialism, according to which objects possess certain properties necessarily - without them the objects would not exist at all. On the basis of this doctrine and revolutionary new ideas about the meaning and reference of proper names and of common nouns denoting "natural kinds" (such as heat, water, and tiger), he argued forcefully that some propositions are necessarily true but knowable only a posteriori - e.g., "Water is H2O" and "Heat is mean molecular kinetic energy" - and that some propositions are contingently true (true in some circumstances but not others) but knowable a priori. These arguments overturned the conventional view, inherited from Immanuel Kant, that identified all a priori propositions as necessary and all a posteriori propositions as contingent. Naming and Necessity also had far-reaching implications regarding the question of whether linguistic meaning and the contents of beliefs and other mental states are partly constituted by social and environmental facts external to the individual. According to Kripke's causal theory of reference, for example, the referent of a given use of a proper name, such as Aristotle, is transmitted through an indefinitely long series of earlier uses; this series constitutes a causal-historical chain that is traceable, in principle, to an original, or “baptismal,” application. Kripke’s view posed a serious challenge to the prevailing "description" theory, which held that the referent of a name is the individual who is picked out by an associated definite description, such as (in the case of Aristotle) the teacher of Alexander the Great. Finally, Kripke’s work contributed greatly to the decline of ordinary language philosophy and related schools, which held that philosophy is nothing more than the logical analysis of language.

In 1975-1976 Kripke published important work on the notion of truth and the liar paradox (which involves sentences that say of themselves that they are not true). According to the then-dominant approach, developed by the Polish logician Alfred Tarski, the liar paradox requires giving up the view that a natural language such as English contains a single truth predicate. Instead, there is a hierarchy of predicates true n for each integer n. The range of each predicate is restricted to that subpart of the language whose sentences contain either no truth predicate at all or truth predicates of a level less than n. Since it follows from this that sentences assessing their own truth or untruth cannot be formulated, inconsistency is avoided, though at the cost of a certain loss of expressive power. Kripke developed a non-hierarchical framework that retained much of this expressive power without surrendering too many of the advantages of Tarski’s theory. Kripke's approach relied on certain previously known conditions under which languages can contain their own truth predicates and on his own intuitive conception of true as a predicate that is only partially defined - i.e., defined by rules that determine a class of positive cases to which the predicate applies, a class of negative cases to which it does not apply, and a class of cases for which no result can be reached. Although certain problems arising from the liar paradox remained recalcitrant, Kripke’s framework succeeded in inspiring and guiding much subsequent work.

In later years Kripke wrote several influential papers on linguistic meaning and language use. "Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference" (1977), for example, explained discrepancies between what the rules of a language determine the referent of a term to be and what speakers use the term to refer to in particular cases. "A Puzzle About Belief" (1979) generated surprising and paradoxical conclusions from seemingly innocent applications of the principles employed in reporting the beliefs of others, and it derived cautionary lessons about attempts to infer facts about linguistic meaning from analyses of belief-reporting sentences. In Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language (1982), Kripke used considerations originating in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) of Ludwig Wittgenstein to raise skeptical questions about whether knowledge of linguistic meaning can be reduced to rule-following, or indeed to any objective facts about speakers. Although Kripke himself drew no conclusion on this point, his discussion was widely interpreted as a serious challenge to attempts to explain meaning in purely naturalistic terms.

Membership

Saul Aaron Kripke is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

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  Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters , Norway

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  European Academy of Sciences and Arts

Personality

Kripke's aversion to writing takes reason in his extreme meticulousness. Kripke seems to be exceptionally anxious about getting anything wrong, which he takes it to an extreme.

Interests

• linguistics

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Stephen Cole Kleene, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski, Ludwig Wittgenstein

Connections

In 1976 Kripke married and subsequently divorced British philosopher Margaret Gilbert, sister of British historian Martin Gilbert. Kripke has no children.

Father:

Myer Samuel Kripke

Mother:

Dorothy Karp

Sister:

Madeline Faith Kripke

Sister:

Netta Kripke Stern

ex-wife:

Margaret Gilbert

Cousin:

Eric Kripke

neighbor:

Laurence Henry Tribe

neighbor:

Theodore John Kaczynski

Acquaintance:

Warren Buffett

References

• Kripke: Puzzles and Mysteries
  2013
• Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kripke and Naming and Necessity
  2014
• Naming, Necessity and More: Explorations in the Philosophical Work of Saul Kripke
  2014
• Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity
  2002