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by arstin 3746 days ago
I enjoy reading Kripke and agree he's done solid work. But I must admit I don't get the "Great Philosopher" thing. He did great work in mathematics as a teenager then basically just applied that model root and branch to the philosophical problems his teachers fed him. Which was a perfectly legitimate, even clarifying contribution for the time. But it's not clear to me how the result was a huge advance outside the local Carnapian tradition he was entirely inside of. (And as received a nice documentation in Soames's history of analytic philosophy which uses Kripke as the hero.) Then again I read "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as almost provincial!

FWIW, I personally find Putnam, Quine, and even Rorty far more interesting to read both now and from a historical perspective.
1 comments
simondedalus 3746 days ago
i agree on the last point (all 3 more interesting, and i agree with including the 'even'). like i said above though, it's hard to deny that his discussion of contingent a priori as such speaks to kant more directly and strongly than, yeah, "two dogmas of empiricism" (i wasn't impressed either).

to put it another way, i think it would be hard to take many other philosophers as deeply entrenched in a particular set of concerns and assumptions (take, like, derrida or godel) and as effectively press the points of their major work against the work of kant or aristotle or some other towering "we all claim her/him!" figure. "naming and necessity" speaks to kant in terms that need to be answered, which is way more than most publish or perish philosophy professors ever achieve in their lifetime (much less right away, in a lecture presenting a semantics based on modal logic!).

but yeah, the point is well taken. kripke is worth reading once / reading about. putnam is worth reading a lot.

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arstin 3746 days ago
Yea that's a good point about just how much better (and...different) Kripkes work is than that which has been produced by the publish or perish academic system in philosophy. As far as I can tell it's been utterly counter-productive.

In Kripkes favor I would also add that he was a great stylist, with warmth and humor and...flexibility of presentation. And that partly because of this NN and WRPL are perfect introductory philosophy texts for "generally educated" people. If I taught philosophy instead of working in tech, I'd probably help keep Kripkes legacy alive for that reason alone!

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simondedalus 3746 days ago
definitely. his warmth and humor are very much on display in "a puzzle about belief" as well:

http://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/lang/Kripke%281979%29.p...

(putnam is cited in this paper as well, by the by)

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