White-bearded and rumpled, he carries books and notebooks on campus at Princeton and later at City University in plastic Filene’s Basement shopping bags.
He also became a cult figure. He was the model for the brilliant but flawed philosopher Noam Himmel in Rebecca Goldstein’s 1983 novel The Mind, Body Problem, and character in the television sitcom The Big Bang His Theory. It is said to be the namesake of Barry Kripke.
But he was not what most people would characterize as a public intellectual.
One reason is that much of his work remains unpublished, in recorded remarks, notes, and privately circulated manuscripts. He improvised lectures for hours without notes, left it up to others to transcribe the recorded remarks, then meticulously edited them later, writing “namings and necessities” and “rules and private language.” Wittgenstein” (1982) and other works.
Even within the Academy, his fellow polymaths were struck by his boundless breadth of ruminations on metaphysics, modal logic, reflexive theory, identical materialism, and the ontological properties of numbers.
Naming and Necessity brings these elements together in a landmark work of analytic philosophy.
“Kripke argues that necessity—the same kind of necessity exhibited by mathematical truths—is to be regarded as a true characteristic of some things in the real world, and not merely an artefact of language. showed,” said Professor Nathan Salmon. He studied under Professor Kripke at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and later became his colleague at Princeton University and City University.
“Things like chemical elements and compounds, things like tables and ships, and even things like us all demonstrate in some way the same kind of need that arises in mathematics,” Professor Salmon said. “Kripke’s realism of inevitability, and his brilliant insight into its logic, made it clear that proper names for people and things—words such as ‘Einstein,’ ‘Charles III,’ and ‘water’— Which led to his important observation of being a specifier. ”