36 Facts About Saul Kripke

Saul Aaron Kripke was an American analytic philosopher and logician.

Saul Kripke was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emeritus professor at Princeton University.

Saul Kripke made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic.

Saul Kripke's principal contribution is a semantics for modal logic involving possible worlds, now called Kripke semantics.

Saul Kripke received the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy.

Saul Kripke was partly responsible for the revival of metaphysics and essentialism after the decline of logical positivism, claiming necessity is a metaphysical notion distinct from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary truths that are known a posteriori, such as that water is H2O.

Saul Kripke was the oldest of three children born to Dorothy K Kripke and Myer S Kripke.

Saul Kripke's father was the leader of Beth El Synagogue, the only Conservative congregation in Omaha, Nebraska; his mother wrote educational Jewish books for children.

Saul Kripke was labeled a prodigy, teaching himself Ancient Hebrew by the age of six, reading Shakespeare's complete works by nine, and mastering the works of Descartes and complex mathematical problems before finishing elementary school.

Saul Kripke wrote his first completeness theorem in modal logic at 17, and had it published a year later.

In 2002 Saul Kripke began teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center, and in 2003 he was appointed a distinguished professor of philosophy there.

Saul Kripke has received honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, Johns Hopkins University, University of Haifa, Israel, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Saul Kripke was a member of the American Philosophical Society and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1985 was a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Saul Kripke won the Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 2001.

Saul Kripke is the second cousin once removed of television writer, director, and producer Eric Kripke.

Saul Kripke died of pancreatic cancer on September 15,2022, in Plainsboro, New Jersey, at the age of 81.

Two of Saul Kripke's earlier works, "A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic" and "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic", the former written when he was a teenager, were on modal logic.

Saul Kripke introduced the now-standard Saul Kripke semantics for modal logics.

Saul Kripke semantics is a formal semantics for non-classical logic systems.

The discovery of Saul Kripke semantics was a breakthrough in the making of non-classical logics, because the model theory of such logics was absent before Saul Kripke.

Saul Kripke semantics has a straightforward generalization to logics with more than one modality.

In Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic, published in 1963, Saul Kripke responded to a difficulty with classical quantification theory.

Saul Kripke gave an example of a system that uses the world-relative interpretation and preserves the classical rules.

An intuitionistic Saul Kripke model is a triple, where is a partially ordered Saul Kripke frame, and satisfies the following conditions:.

Saul Kripke points out that proper names, in contrast to most descriptions, are rigid designators: that is, a proper name refers to the named object in every possible world in which the object exists, while most descriptions designate different objects in different possible worlds.

Finally, Saul Kripke gave an argument against identity materialism in the philosophy of mind, the view that every mental particular is identical with some physical particular.

Saul Kripke delivered the John Locke Lectures in philosophy at Oxford in 1973.

Smith argued that Saul Kripke failed to understand Marcus's theory at the time but later adopted many of its key conceptual themes in his New Theory of Reference.

Saul Kripke then learns English the same way a child would learn the language, that is, not by translating words from French to English.

Saul Kripke writes that this paradox is "the most radical and original skeptical problem that philosophy has seen to date", and that Wittgenstein does not reject the argument that leads to the rule-following paradox, but accepts it and offers a "skeptical solution" to ameliorate the paradox's destructive effects.

Saul Kripke himself expresses doubts in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language as to whether Wittgenstein would endorse his interpretation of Philosophical Investigations.

Saul Kripke says that the work should not be read as an attempt to give an accurate statement of Wittgenstein's views, but rather as an account of Wittgenstein's argument "as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him".

Saul Kripke's book generated a large secondary literature, divided between those who find his skeptical problem interesting and perceptive, and others, such as Gordon Baker, Peter Hacker, and Colin McGinn, who argue that his meaning skepticism is a pseudo-problem that stems from a confused, selective reading of Wittgenstein.

Saul Kripke showed how to do this recursively by starting from the set of expressions in a language that do not contain the truth predicate, and defining a truth predicate over just that segment: this action adds new sentences to the language, and truth is in turn defined for all of them.

Unlike Tarski's approach Saul Kripke's lets "truth" be the union of all of these definition-stages; after a denumerable infinity of steps the language reaches a "fixed point" such that using Saul Kripke's method to expand the truth-predicate does not change the language any further.

The Saul Kripke Center holds events related to Kripke's work and is creating a digital archive of previously unpublished recordings of Kripke's lectures, lecture notes, and correspondence dating back to the 1950s.