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Machine generated contents note: Introduction Alan Berger; Part I. Naming, Necessity, Identity, and A Priority: 1. Kripke on proper and general names Bernard Linsky; 2. Kripke on vacuous names and names in fiction Nathan Salmon; 3. Kripke on epistemic and modal possibility: two routes to the necessary a posteriori Scott Soames; 4. Possible world semantics and its philosophic foundations Robert Stalnaker; Part II. Formal Semantics, Truth, Philosophy of Math, and Philosophy of Logic: 5. Kripke models for modal logic and intuitionism John Burgess; 6. Kripke's theory of truth John Burgess; 7. Kripke on logicism, Wittgenstein, and de re beliefs about numbers Mark Steiner; 8. Kripke on the incoherency of adopting a logic Alan Berger; Part III. Language and Mind: 9. Kripke's new puzzle about belief and our principles of belief attribution Mark Richard; 10.; A note on Kripke's puzzle about belief Nathan Salmon; 11. Kripke's version of Wittgenstein: some conceptions and misconceptions George Wilson; 12. Kripke on color words and the primary, secondary quality distinction Mario Gomez-Torrente; Part IV. Philosophy of Mind and Philosophical Psychology: 13. Kripke's views on carteisianism and naturalism Sydney Shoemaker; 14. Kripke's critique of functionalism Jeff Buechner.

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

Saul Kripke is struck by a skeptical argument which he says is neither Wittgenstein’s nor his own. I call this new skeptic “Saul Wittgenstein”. SW’s conclusion is that there is no such thing as following a rule. My first aim is to show that Kripke misunderstands the Investigations when he says it offers a “skeptical solution” to SW’s paradox. Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy commits him to a dissolution of the paradox. I show next that LW’s writing contains an implicit dissolution of it. Finally, I point out the main lesson to be derived from Kripke’s discussion--namely, that there is nothing which is common and peculiar to what we call following a rule.

It may be that all that matters for the modalities, possibility and necessity, is the object named by the proper name, not which proper name names it. An influential defender of this view is Saul Kripke. Kripke’s defense is criticized in the paper.

Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, and the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world.

In Naming and Necessity' Saul A. Kripke gives two types of examples of contingent truths knowable a priori. So he disagrees with the first leg of the thesis. As we will see later, his examples depend on the direct designation theory of names. While there have been attempts to provide examples of the contingent a priori that do not depend on that theory, most of those examples should be viewed as expansions, or modifications, of Kripke's examples. Philip Kitcher, for example, gives an interesting example that has nothing to do with theories of names, but is produced using the indexical 'actual'.2 His example, however, is a variation of Kripke's Neptune Type example.' In what follows I will focus on Kripke's two types of examples and modifications of them. I will argue that although both types of example fail, it is possible to modify his Standard Metre example in such a way that we have an example of the contingent a priori.