Who Is Saul Kripke? (Greatest Living Philosopher)

An explanation of the life and works of Saul Kripke, the Prodigy Logician, Master of Modal Language, and Greatest Living Philosopher, including Kripke Semantics, Naming and Necessity, Kripkenstein and more!

Sponsors: João Costa Neto, Dakota Jones, Joe Felix, Prince Otchere, Mike Samuel, Daniel Helland, Dennis Sexton, Yu Saburi, Mauricino Andrade, Will Roberts and √2. Thanks for your support!

[CosmoShidan]

Heh, I was actually at a lecture of his last year, and got my picture taken with Kripke!

[jackiereynolds]

The appraisal, the recognition, the actual celebration of 'greatness' which ideally (or should) follows a or the genuine 'meaning' of 'great' - ironically😐 falls right in place so very 'exactly' with
Kripke and this work with Modal logic - 'straight-away - and in the first place ! ! ! Beautiful,
I Love it 💘
Mankind's number-one problem, is NOT all of the garbage we are all buried each and every day, -
It is and 'has-always-been' - very simply the enumerable pitfalls of COMMUNICATION ! ! !
By-and-for this 'reason' - we all are even fatally crippled (not even handicapped) even 'before we actually begin ! ! !
WHY do Kripke and Wittgenstein ... make the most incredibly perfect sense - a common and most obvious simple 'sense', - that we all seem to continuously struggle with ?
Thankfully Iv'e been granted the exemption of 🤪.

[MrAsp]

Well, I guess it's time to change the title

[MyriadColorsCM]

I´ve heard someone say that kripke has a body of work he doesn´t show to anyone but his friends.

[Dayglodaydreams]

Interesting. I might look at Kripkean Semantics. I like Saussure, Pierce, sometimes even Langer, Levi-Strauss and even Wittgenstein in semantics.

[Ndo]

Kripke's idea that you can pick out a person across multiple worlds sounds analogous to Frege's sense theory; having multiple senses be part of the same referent

[JXZX]

Took me a while to get to this, but a good way to start.

Always more impressed by Godel, but Kripke is a genius among us.

[axelbatalha]

Wait... he may have taught himself Ancient Hebrew the same way that I taught myself Japanese when I wad 8. But that doesn't mean he learned it - especially if you consider that his vocabulary was not long in his own native language at that age. The same applies to Shakespeare - did he really get all the sexual innuendos at an early age? What about Descartes? Understanding Descartes is more than a matter of geniality, you must have read a gigantic pile of philosophy books by philosophers that preceded him; otherwise, you will see only a dim light. So, that story lacks important clarification

[arinalikes]

Not anymore. RIP. Sad that I never heard him teach in person.

[internetenjoyer]

he came up with formulas of algebra independently when he was 7

[frankienbloo]

I am trying to understand the implications of this.
Essentially, is this saying: Suppose there is some mathematical model, which is consistent (venus).
Since it's consistent, we can be confident that whatever this mathematical model represents in the real world, it exists (venus).
However, since we don't necessarily know what the mathematical model is describing (evening star/morning star), we can't definitively pin down what it is actually describing (morning star/evening star) until we see some empirical evidence which reconciles with the mathematical model (venus)?

[benjaminprzybocki]

With regard to Kripke's philosophy of language, I'm not convinced that there are necessary a posteriori propositions. Why couldn't there be a possible world in which the Morning Star is in fact different than the Evening Star? I understand that "that astronomical object I see in the morning" has the same referent as "that astronomical object I see in the evening" in the actual world. But I see no reason why these distinct senses could not have different referents in another possible world.

[Robert.Deeeee]

Kripke!?! Ha, The Amazing Atheist is clearly the world's greatest living philosopher.

[havenbastion]

He can't be the greatest living philosopher because i am. He can't claim to have answered everything in metaphysics.

[AntiCitizenX]

To describe Saul Kripke as the "greatest living philosopher" does not bode well for philosophy. When you actually look at the life's work of Kripke, he didn't exactly do a whole lot of very interesting things. At least, no more or less interesting than any other average mathematician or scientist. I've even listened to some of his live lectures, and the guy fundamentally sucks at communicating ideas. So the fact that he is given such high praise only leaves me wondering what on earth all those other thousands of PhD philosophers are doing with their lives. It's kind of insulting to the entire field of philosophy to elevate such a mediocre career, especially given so many of his terrible ideas. In particular, the notion of "necessary a-prosteriori" is one of the most ludicrous things to ever come out of modern philosophy.

[Zagg]

Unfortunately, transworld identification requires real essences.

[michaelaristidou]

Greatest philosopher? Are you sh€tting us?