Product Description

′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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73019 in Books
• Published on: 1981-07-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

Review
"Brilliant and very influential . . . stands up as an impressive and enduring work of philosophy, outstanding in its sweep, clarity and penetration." Colin McGinn, Times Higher Education Supplement

"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 provides a chance to look back at a modern classic, and to say something about why it was found so shocking and liberating." Richard Rorty, London Review of Books

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.

Customer Reviews

Critical knowledge, well written
Kripke's work on naming and reference was a revolution, this book is essential if you need, as I did, to fully understand the roots of kinds and reference. I am perhaps being mean with my four stars, but I believe him to be somewhat wordy, not being quite as articulate as he is capable. I dislike any form academic inaccessability and Kripke is guilty of writing, in places, only for his peers.

Great and very readable
I'd just like to correct one of the reviewers below - Kripke didn't write for a restricted audience. The book is a transcription of a series of lectures he gave at an American university (I forget which), so if he seems wordy, this is attributable to the clarity of meaning lost in the transcription from spoken to written language.

The book itself is split into three lectures - Kripke can be summarised as arguing against the Frege-Russell thesis (the idea that proper names in natural language can be analysed as definite descriptions or as clusters of definite descriptions). His modal, epistemic and semantic arguments are contributions to this. He introduces the notion of rigid designation to support his claim to a causal-historical theory of reference for proper names, and extends this in the third lecture to a semi-Aristotelian scientific essentialism, a consequence of which is, if water is H2O, then water is necessarily H2O.

It's not intended to be hugely accessible, but it transpires that it is because it was given as lectures. If you want a more modern take on what is a very important debate in philosophical logic, then buy this book. If you don't, don't buy it.