Naming & Necessity - Hardcover

Kripke, SA

4

4,272 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674598458 ISBN 13: 9780674598454

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1980

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If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics or in philosophy of language, this is it. Ever since the publication of its original version, Naming and Necessity has had great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of reference, in particular of naming, and of identity. From a critique of the dominant tendency to assimilate names to descriptions and more generally to treat their reference as a function of their Fregean sense, surprisingly deep and widespread consequences may be drawn. The largely discredited distinction between accidental and essential properties, both of individual things (including people) and of kinds of things, is revived. So is a consequent view of science as what seeks out the essences of natural kinds. Traditional objections to such views are dealt with by sharpening distinctions between epistemic and metaphysical necessity; in particular by the startling admission of necessary a posteriori truths. From these, in particular from identity statements using rigid designators whether of things or of kinds, further remarkable consequences are drawn for the natures of things, of people, and of kinds; strong objections follow, for example to identity versions of materialism as a theory of the mind. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here published with a substantial new Preface by the author.

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Review:

An impressive and enduring work of philosophy, outstanding in its sweep, clarity, and penetration. Kripke's lectures constitute something of a landmark in the recent development of philosophy... Kripke's penetrating good sense... and his brilliance in the devising of suggestive examples to test a theory's plausibility, have ensured that the topics he deals with can never took quite the same again. When these lectures were first published eight years ago, they stood analytic philosophy on its ear. Everybody was either furious, or exhilarated, or thoroughly perplexed. No one was indifferent. This welcome republication in a separate volume (with a helpful new preface, but no substantive changes) provides a chance to look back at a modern classic, and to say something about why it was found so shocking and liberating. "Naming and Necessity" lays out a way of thinking about the relation between language and the world which permits just as formal and rigorous a treatment of notions like "meaning," "truth" and "reference" as had Russell's and Frege's. Nobody would have believed that the neatness--what Kripke calls "the marvellous internal coherence"--of Frege-Russell semantics could be duplicated after everything was turned upside down. But Kripke showed how to do it, and now philosophers are busily rewriting all of semantics (and a good deal of epistemology) in Kripkean terms.

From the Back Cover:

Naming and Necessity has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity. This seminal work, to which today′s thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here reissued in a newly corrected form with a new preface by the author. If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics, or in philosophy of language, this is it.

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