In 1970, the philosopher Saul Kripke, who has died aged 81, gave three lectures at Princeton University that shook up Anglo-American philosophy. Speaking without notes, he interwove topics in the separate fields of modal logic (concerning necessity and possibility), philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, transformed each, and resuscitated metaphysics.
The resulting book, Naming and Necessity (1980), is one of the major philosophical works of the 20th century. It opens with an apparently abstruse question: what connects a name to the individual – whether present, distant or dead – who is named?
