Hacker News Reader

Comment by skarist | Hacker News Reader

A great thinker has passed. One of the great names of 20th century analytical philosophy. They have now all left us, Quine, Rorty, Davidson and now Putnam. RIP.

I guess they had a similar event on Twin Earth... even though their "water" may be a bit different from our H2O.

View on HN

Tyler Burge, Kripke, and David Kaplan are still left from the old guard of the golden age of philosophy of language/mind era.

Yes... as is John McDowell, Crispin Wright, John Searle and Alvin Plantinga.

Let's not forget Derek Parfit.

Fodor too.

Kripke is still here. I would add him to that list.

Most definitely.

yeah. kripke can be convicted of truly awful exegesis of russell, frege, wittgenstein, but his own contributions to philosophy are mammoth. his attack on the identity of necessary truths and a priori knowledge alone is excellent.

While I would agree that his interpretation of Wittgenstein on following a rule and private language, is wrong as such, i.e. as an interpretation, it is definitely very interesting and thought provoking stuff. It is good philosophy and bears good witness to the creative genius of Kripke.

the stuff he calls the "frege-russel theory of names" is even more egregious than his take on wittgenstein.

to be fair, i don't believe his "take on wittgenstein" is exegetical anyway. he's putting forward his own (interesting!) plus/quus argument. kripkenstein is worth reading in its own right; if you care enough to get wittgenstein right in the first place you shouldn't really be looking to kripke's writing to get there.

and of course, "the frege-russell picture of names" is just a straw man to propel his argument forward in N&N. he's really talking to/about searle there, and most people who are going to read N&N know that. but the stuff he says is still wildly inaccurate if you take it at face value.

(not that frege's views on sense and reference are all that clear in the first place, but they weren't the nonsense that frege (or searle!) attribute to him)

I enjoy reading Kripke and agree he's done solid work. But I must admit I don't get the "Great Philosopher" thing. He did great work in mathematics as a teenager then basically just applied that model root and branch to the philosophical problems his teachers fed him. Which was a perfectly legitimate, even clarifying contribution for the time. But it's not clear to me how the result was a huge advance outside the local Carnapian tradition he was entirely inside of. (And as received a nice documentation in Soames's history of analytic philosophy which uses Kripke as the hero.) Then again I read "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as almost provincial!

FWIW, I personally find Putnam, Quine, and even Rorty far more interesting to read both now and from a historical perspective.

i agree on the last point (all 3 more interesting, and i agree with including the 'even'). like i said above though, it's hard to deny that his discussion of contingent a priori as such speaks to kant more directly and strongly than, yeah, "two dogmas of empiricism" (i wasn't impressed either).

to put it another way, i think it would be hard to take many other philosophers as deeply entrenched in a particular set of concerns and assumptions (take, like, derrida or godel) and as effectively press the points of their major work against the work of kant or aristotle or some other towering "we all claim her/him!" figure. "naming and necessity" speaks to kant in terms that need to be answered, which is way more than most publish or perish philosophy professors ever achieve in their lifetime (much less right away, in a lecture presenting a semantics based on modal logic!).

but yeah, the point is well taken. kripke is worth reading once / reading about. putnam is worth reading a lot.

Yea that's a good point about just how much better (and...different) Kripkes work is than that which has been produced by the publish or perish academic system in philosophy. As far as I can tell it's been utterly counter-productive.

In Kripkes favor I would also add that he was a great stylist, with warmth and humor and...flexibility of presentation. And that partly because of this NN and WRPL are perfect introductory philosophy texts for "generally educated" people. If I taught philosophy instead of working in tech, I'd probably help keep Kripkes legacy alive for that reason alone!

definitely. his warmth and humor are very much on display in "a puzzle about belief" as well:

http://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Kripke%281979%29.p...

(putnam is cited in this paper as well, by the by)

Who stole his ideas from Ruth Barcan Marcus: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html

if this article makes you think kripke stole the idea of rigid designation, you may as well say he stole it from john stuart mill (or st. augustine, for that matter).

That phrasing is a little unfortunate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com