Saul Kripke: Naming and Necessity (In-Person)

There are perhaps a handful of texts in the history of philosophy that have completely upended the discipline, dashing away consensus and establishing a new paradigm within which all philosophers in the field must thereafter operate. Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity is one. Initially delivered as a series of lectures, Naming and Necessity proclaimed the modest aim of critiquing the widely held “descriptivist” theory of names—or the idea that a proper name is equivalent to a description of what it names. The name “Richard Nixon,” descriptivists say, means something like “the 37th president of the United States.” But, as Kripke asks, what if Nixon had lost the 1968 election? Wouldn’t he still be Richard Nixon? Applying the modal logic that (as a child prodigy) he’d previously helped formalize, Kripke established that names are “rigid designators,” applicable to the associated individual in “all possible worlds.” But from the sometimes intuitive, sometimes technical arguments he offers against the descriptivist theory, surprising and far-reaching implications emerge. Kripke’s “rigid designators” struck at the foundation of traditional treatments of knowledge, from Descartes’s cogito to Kant’s transcendental idealism to Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism. What is the relationship between language and reality, between experience and logical necessity? And how does Kripke’s theory of naming force a reconsideration of the very conditions of truth?

In this course, we will closely read Naming and Necessity, with the aim of understanding Kripke’s theory of names, the challenge it poses to prominent traditions in epistemology and philosophy of mind since the 17th century, and its legacy in more recent theorizing about referring expressions. We’ll begin with an examination of the philosophers Kripke labels “descriptivists,” most notably Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. From there, we’ll turn to Naming and Necessity itself, supplemented by selections from Reference and Existence, Kripke’s 1973 lectures which further develop key ideas from Naming. Finally, we’ll look at more recent criticisms and Kripkean trends in theories of mind, language, and reference. Additional readings from W.V.O. Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Gareth Evans, David Chalmers, Timothy Williamson, and others.

Course Schedule

Sunday, 2:00-5:00pm ET
February 02 — February 23, 2025
4 weeks

$335.00

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