Collected Papers, Volume 1: Philosophical Troubles

by Saul A. Kripke

This important new book is the first of a series of volumes collecting the essential articles by the eminent and highly influential philosopher Saul A. Kripke. It presents a mixture of published and unpublished articles from various stages of Kripke's storied career.
Included here are seminal and much discussed pieces such as "Identity and Necessity," "Outline of a Theory of Truth," "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference," and "A Puzzle About Belief." More recent published articles include "Russell's Notion of Scope" and "Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference" among others. Several articles are published here for the first time, including both older works ("Two Paradoxes of Knowledge," "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities," "Nozick on Knowledge") as well as newer ("The First Person" and "Unrestricted Exportation"). "A Puzzle on Time and Thought" was written expressly for this volume.
Publication of this volume -- which ranges over epistemology, linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy, theory of truth, and metaphysics -- represents a major event in contemporary analytic philosophy. It will be of great interest to the many who are interested in the work of one its greatest living figures.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

404 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2011

About the author

Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician, now emeritus from Princeton. He teaches as distinguished professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center. Since the 1960s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and set theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape-recordings and privately circulated manuscripts.

Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska, Omaha (1977), Johns Hopkins University (1997), University of Haifa, Israel (1998), and the University of Pennsylvania (2005). He is a member of the American Philosophical Society. Kripke is also an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In a recent poll conducted by philosophers Kripke was among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years.

Reviews

[Chant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kripke at his best is just Kripke, which this volume of collected papers shows. I will admit that some of it I didn't understand fully in my first reading of it, but I'd imagine it would be crystal clear once I eventually give it another read through.

The papers on naming and belief were of great interest to me and again, I will read through when I need a Kripke fix.

Also, as the the other reviewer noted, these papers are more towards the philosophy of language and metaphysics. It has been floating around that another volume on his logic will be published, so wait for that if you're interested more so in his logic.

[John Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are fine papers in metaphysics, logic and semantics. Kripke has the peculiar ability to take the reader with him on a path of reasoning that is light on technical obstruction and bare of literary adornments. This is not to say these papers are easy reading because it takes careful reading and rereading to garner the profundity of Kripke’s arguments. This will be the task of scholarship and philosophy for decades to come. Jumping the gun, I wonder if Kripke, who evidently is well “on the spectrum”, has a spiritual angle against pure materialism to accommodate his father, a conservative Rabbi .

This kind of book is never finished.

[zimu]

Chapter read: Nozick on Knowledge