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Life
A teenager in Omaha who had already mastered set theory and Wittgenstein, he grew up to argue that names don't describe things, they just point at them — in this world and in every possible world besides.
He invented modern logic and analytic philosophy in a small German university town, and almost no one noticed for twenty years.
Connection
Gottlob Frege descriptivism directly challenged Saul Kripke — Kripke's Naming and Necessity mounted a sustained direct challenge to Frege's theory that a proper name is shorthand for a cluster of descriptions, proposing rigid designation as an alternative that reshaped the philosophy of language.
Ideas
Words
“A rigid designator designates the same object in every possible world in which that object exists.”
“Identity statements between names, when true, are necessarily true, even though one might not know it a priori.”
“Never let us take a description of the origin of an idea for a definition, or an account of the mental conditions on which we become conscious of a proposition for a proof of it.”
Key Moments
1959
Publishes a landmark logic paper as a teenager
1970
Delivers the Naming and Necessity lectures
1874
Forty years at Jena
June 1902
Russell's paradox destroys the Basic Laws
Works
Naming and Necessity
The Foundations of Arithmetic