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Obituary

Saul Kripke (13th November 1940 - 15th September 2022)

Stefan Rinner tells us about Kripke’s theories and why they matter.

As philosophers, we find again and again that ‘What is philosophy?’ is as difficult a question as any other philosophical problem. However, in the middle of the twentieth century, there seemed to be a simple answer to it: philosophers primarily analyze concepts. Accordingly, answering the question “What is knowledge?”, for example, was tantamount to answering the question “What is the meaning of the term ‘knowledge’?”

The reason why philosophers thought that their craft consisted primarily in analyzing concepts was a certain theory of meaning – the so-called ‘description theory of meaning’. According to this, the meaning of a referring expression is given by a description uniquely picking out the referent of the term, i.e.

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