Saul Kripke has died
dailynous.com
dailynous.com
Especially since you probably didn't want to step on his toes by breaking the silence while he still held the floor - he was, after all, forced to retire from schoolteaching after beating one of his slower math students unconscious.
As an aside, it is very interesting how many writers on Wittgenstein, and working in what we might broadly call Ordinary Language philosophy, achieve such a startling clarity. An early example (even before Wittgenstein) is also RG Collingwood. His writing is straightforward and clear as day, eschewing jargon for the language we use day to day, for that was ultimately their focus. They wanted to dissolve philosophical problems.
"A means something by x" is equivalent to "A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention".
It may seem less than clear taken out of context, but there is a wonderful argument working toward the definition and once he finally presents it, it's a bit of a mic drop moment.
Also, he is one of the few philosophers whose work proved to be foundational in linguistics. Any book/course in pragmatics will talk about Grice's work on implicature and background knowledge.
This is humorous
edit: my mistake
Here is the book where Soames, Smith engage with each other: https://www.amazon.com/New-Theory-Reference-Origins-Synthese...
hah, person of gender.
Kripke was truly a brilliant philosopher.
Yeah, there are a lot of us. Spend a few years deeply studying logic and reasoning, and programming really just feels like a different version of the same thing.
Learning an algorithm is very similar to learning an argument or a proof, and designing algorithms is very similar to designing arguments.
I wouldn't say a lot, I've never met a fellow philosopher/developer in person. I would expect there would be more!
There really are a number of delightful intersections between the two subjects and I have considered writing a book on them,“Philosophy for Computer Scientists” or perhaps “Computer Science for Philosophers” :)
Yet nothing I've seen in the press has described his predation of women in the department. In fact I learned of it only later when speaking with female linguists.
I heard him speak once and could have gone and spoken with him but turned down the opportunity. I'm male, but why should I then be so lucky to be able to have an ordinary conversation with him?
His attitude towards women was notorious, and he didn't work with any as far as I know. I consider it's as much worth discussion as Heidegger's or Sartre's politics.
In the case of my GP comment, I mentioned how I learned of it with that in mind. In my case, still hearsay of course.
(This is a joke, but something I used to hear in philosophy is that kripke felt some of his drafts were “not ready” despite circulating since the 70’s. The John Locke lectures are an example, I believe.)
This is a typical philosophical tradition.
Many college professors have a library of essays of others' circulated and unpublished work.
I heard about his death elsewhere this morning and was surprised I didn't see it before. They have a ton of obits for less consequential people.