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A philosopher at my alma mater wrote a controversial paper accusing Kripke of plagiarism. I'm not competent to weigh in on that question, but I thought this article was interesting: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Wittgenstein somewhat struggled to express his insights” is a bit like “Kafka had certain reservations about society”.
how much clearer can you be than a nicely numbered list? :D
I remember studying Naming And Necessity in my undergrad and being blown away by the clarity of his arguments. It is an amazing skill to express oneself so concisely, and many of his arguments/thought experiments have a 'commonsense' quality to them that make them very persuasive.. By contrast other great philosophers of language like Wittgenstein had the insight but somewhat struggled to express it.
“Wittgenstein somewhat struggled to express his insights” is a bit like “Kafka had certain reservations about society”.
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.
When I was right out of college I worked with a guy who had a PhD in philosophy and had studied Kripke closely. He was working in software at the time because it’s hard to make a living as a philosopher. He gave me one of his extra copies of Naming and Necessity. I had never read any philosophy and I was amazed. 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.
Now maybe we can finally get our hands on the unpublished work! (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.)
From one of the obits I learned the Locke lectures were finally published in 2013! In the early 2000s our prof handed out what I believe were a former colleague’s xeroxed notes from them.
I remember studying Naming And Necessity in my undergrad and being blown away by the clarity of his arguments. It is an amazing skill to express oneself so concisely, and many of his arguments/thought experiments have a 'commonsense' quality to them that make them very persuasive.. By contrast other great philosophers of language like Wittgenstein had the insight but somewhat struggled to express it.
I don't entirely agree with some elements of Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein (I'm more partial to the Baker and Hacker position), but he was so important to keeping Witty in the discussion that it's hard to not give him enormous credit. 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.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Wittgenstein somewhat struggled to express his insights” is a bit like “Kafka had certain reservations about society”.
His teaching at Cambridge often had minutes-long silences, in which the class just had to wait for him to conclude his thoughts and resume teaching. It was apparently agonizing for some of his students. 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 studen…
Now maybe we can finally get our hands on the unpublished work! (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.