Saul Kripke

From Philosopedia

- in 1983

- in 2001

Kripke, Saul (1940 - )

A Princeton philosophy professor now emeritus and professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center in mid-town Manhattan, the Omaha-born Kripke, whose father was a rabbi, is outspoken about his Judaism.

While a student at Harvard, Kripke was roommates with Constitution law scholar Laurence Tribe and (for a short period) with Theodore Kaczynski (often termed "The Unabomber").

In an interview with a Norwegian student, Andreas Saugstad said he keeps the Sabbath, does not use public transportation on Saturdays, finds that religion helps him in philosophy, and

• I don't have the prejudices many have today. I don't believe in a naturalist world view. I don't base my thinking on prejudices or a world view and do not believe in materialism.

As to whether philosophy can promote peace in the Middle East, where he had been studying at Hebrew University,

• I don't think philosophy can contribute more than other disciplines. Practical philosophy may contribute here, but not all philosophers. That would have been nice, but in practice it is not possible.

Saugstad's evaluation of Kripke:

• Kripke is a peculiar man with a sharp intellect. He talks fast and he thinks perhaps even faster. One is still stricken by the fact that he does not seem vitally concerned about applying philosophy to social issues. His ideals do not seem to be those of the visionary public intellectual, like Sartre, Russell, Chomsky or Cornel West. Kripke is one of America's most respected philosophers, still he is not significant in public debates. But the Mind-Body problem is perhaps not so big after all. The logician is talkative and extroverted. He drinks a lot of tea and waves to get the waiter's attention. The interview started with Kripke giving me an intellectual test (which I did not manage to solve), and he told me many stories about Wittgenstein. But when it comes to practical issues, it is more difficult to make him talk. Still, it is a great experience to have met him. The mind of the logician is vital and powerful. For many he is a living legend.

• Kripke has give many original contributions to philosophy, and many doctoral dissertations have been written on his work. But Kripke has also been criticized. A former student wrote a novel where the main character seems to be modeled after Kripke. In this novel, The Mind-Body Problem, the main character has a problem with the relation between the abstract and concrete. The person is, intellectually speaking very advanced, but outside the academic realm, it doesn't work.

Kripke in his lectures is negatively critical of Ludwig Wittgenstein's views on meaning, has told students that Hume was so obese he hated to look at his image in a mirror, repudiates some of Frege's views, and attacks Bertrand Russell for his descriptivist theories of reference with respect to proper names.

He has written about semantics for modal and related logics. "His Naming and Necessity (1980) led some to say that the book "made metaphysics respectable again."

Saugstad suggests what philosophy department members long have gossiped, that Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem (1983) is a novel about her unsatisfying relationship with Kripke:

• In this novel, The Mind-Body Problem, the main character has a problem with the relation between the abstract and concrete. The person is, intellectually speaking very advanced, but outside the academic realm, it doesn't work.

Kripke's work is mainly unpublished, consisting of tape-recordidngs and privately circulated manuscripts.

In 2001 he was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize.