Origins & Early Life

Saul Aaron Kripke (; November 13, 1940 – September 15, 2022) was an American philosopher and logician. He was a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a professor emeritus at Princeton University. From the 1960s until his death, he was a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical and modal logic, philosophy of language and mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory. Kripke made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic.

Pivotal Works & Achievements

His principal contribution is a semantics for modal logic involving possible worlds, now called Kripke semantics. He received the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. Kripke was also partly responsible for the revival of metaphysics and essentialism after the decline of logical positivism, claiming necessity is a metaphysical notion distinct from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary truths that are known a posteriori, such as that water is H2O. A 1970 Princeton lecture series, published in book form in 1980 as Naming and Necessity, is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century...

Enduring Legacy & Impact

The historical impact and works continue to influence the modern world.

Contemporary Figures & Related Historical Timelines

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