Blackwell Reference Online

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Kripke once said, “People used to talk about concepts more, and now they talk about words more…. Sometimes I think it's better to talk about concepts.” In fact, Kripke himself has said important things, and developed and deployed significant conceptual resources, about both words and concepts. Saul Aaron Kripke was born in Bay Shore, New York. His mother Dorothy was a teacher and father Myer a rabbi. The family soon moved to Omaha, Nebraska where Kripke spent most of his childhood. He was a child prodigy, learning Hebrew on his own at the age of 6 and reading all of Shakespeare in the fourth grade. But it was in mathematics that he exhibited the greatest precocity: he derived results in algebra – intuitively, without the benefit of algebraic notation – in fourth grade and taught himself geometry and calculus by the end of elementary school. By the time he was in high school, Kripke's work in mathematical logic was so advanced that he presented some of it at a professional mathematics conference. Around the time he published his first article, “A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic,” Kripke was on his way to Harvard, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962. But during his years at Harvard, Kripke's interests already began to shift to philosophy. In 1963 Kripke was appointed to the Harvard Society of Fellows and later to positions as lecturer at Princeton ... log in or subscribe to read full text