John Burgess

Saul Kripke has been a major influence on analytic philosophy and allied fields for a half-century and more. His early masterpiece, Naming and Necessity, reversed the pattern of two centuries of philosophizing about the necessary and the contingent. Although much of his work remains unpublished, several major essays have now appeared in print, most recently in his long-awaited collection Philosophical Troubles. In this book Kripke’s long-time colleague, the logician and philosopher John P. Burgess, offers a thorough and self-contained guide to all of Kripke’s published books and his most important philosophical papers, old and new. It also provides an authoritative but non-technical account of Kripke’s influential contributions to the study of modal logic and logical paradoxes. Although Kripke has been anything but a system-builder, Burgess expertly uncovers the connections between different parts of his oeuvre. Kripke is shown grappling, often in opposition to existing traditions, with mysteries surrounding the nature of necessity, rule-following, and the conscious mind, as well as with intricate and intriguing puzzles about identity, belief and self-reference. Clearly contextualizing the full range of Kripke’s work, Burgess outlines, summarizes and surveys the issues raised by each of the philosopher’s major publications. Kripke will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of one of analytic philosophy’s greatest living thinkers.

Today there appears to be a widespread impression that W. V. Quine's notorious critique of modal logic, based on certain ideas about reference, has been successfully answered. As one writer put it some years ago: “His objections have been dead for a while, even though they have not yet been completely buried.” What is supposed to have killed off the critique? Some would cite the development of a new ‘possible-worlds’ model theory for modal logics in the 1960s; others, the development of new ‘direct’ theories of reference for names in the 1970s.These developments do suggest that Quine's unfriendliness towards any formal logics but the classical and indifference towards theories of reference for any singular terms but variables were unfortunate.