Overview

Naming and Necessity has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here reissued in a newly corrected form with a new preface by the author. If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics, or in philosophy of language, this is it.

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9780470672280

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Brilliant and very influential . . . stands up as an impressive and enduring work of philosophy, outstanding in its sweep, clarity and penetration. -- Colin McGinn, Times Higher Education Supplement <p> When these lectures were first published eight years ago, they stood analytic philosophy on its ear. Everybody was either furious, or exhilarated, or thoroughly perplexed. No one was indifferent. This welcome republication provides a chance to look back at a modern classic, and to say something about why it was found so shocking and liberating. -- Richard Rorty, London Review of Books

When these lectures were first published eight years ago, they stood analytic philosophy on its ear. Everybody was either furious, or exhilarated, or thoroughly perplexed. No one was indifferent. This welcome republication in a separate volume (with a helpful new preface, but no substantive changes) provides a chance to look back at a modern classic, and to say something about why it was found so shocking and liberating. Naming and Necessity lays out a way of thinking about the relation between language and the world which permits just as formal and rigorous a treatment of notions like meaning, truth and reference as had Russell's and Frege's. Nobody would have believed that the neatness--what Kripke calls the marvellous internal coherence --of Frege-Russell semantics could be duplicated after everything was turned upside down. But Kripke showed how to do it, and now philosophers are busily rewriting all of semantics (and a good deal of epistemology) in Kripkean terms. Brilliant and very influential . . . stands up as an impressive and enduring work of philosophy, outstanding in its sweep, clarity and penetration. -- Colin McGinn, Times Higher Education Supplement When these lectures were first published eight years ago, they stood analytic philosophy on its ear. Everybody was either furious, or exhilarated, or thoroughly perplexed. No one was indifferent. This welcome republication provides a chance to look back at a modern classic, and to say something about why it was found so shocking and liberating. -- Richard Rorty, London Review of Books

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