20th century · 1940–2022
Who influenced Saul Kripke?
Influences
Naming and Necessity: rigid designators and the metaphysics of possible worlds.
Saul Kripke was influenced by Rudolf Carnap and W. V. O. Quine. That is 2 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Oursipan, Public domain See the whole map
Who was Saul Kripke?
Saul Kripke gave modal logic a semantics of possible worlds, now called Kripke semantics. He helped revive metaphysics after logical positivism by arguing that necessity is a metaphysical notion distinct from the a priori, so some truths, such as that water is H2O, are necessary yet known only by experience.
His lectures Naming and Necessity (1980) treat names as rigid designators that pick out the same object in every possible world, and set out a causal theory of reference against the views of Frege and Russell. His reading of Wittgenstein on following rules became known as "Kripkenstein".
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Saul Kripke?
2 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Rudolf Carnap 1891–1970
- W. V. O. Quine 1908–2000
The line of teachers behind Saul Kripke
The longest documented line of influence ending at Saul Kripke runs 28 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Georg W. F. Hegel
- T. H. Green
- F. H. Bradley
- Bertrand Russell
- Rudolf Carnap
- W. V. O. Quine
- Saul Kripke
Two steps away from Saul Kripke
Indirect influences
- Through Rudolf Carnap: Ernst Mach, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell
Contemporaries of Saul Kripke
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Saul Kripke, with no direct line between them.
- Tzvetan Todorov 1939–2017
- David Lewis 1941–2001
- Robert Nozick 1938–2002
- Derek Parfit 1942–2017
- Edward Said 1935–2003
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016
- John Searle 1932–2025
- Richard Rorty 1931–2007
Saul Kripke by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 2
- Direct followers
- 0
- Thinkers upstream
- 107
- Thinkers downstream
- 0
- Wikipedia languages
- 45 — #55 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Rare
Schools and lineages
Questions about Saul Kripke
- Who influenced Saul Kripke?
- Rudolf Carnap and W. V. O. Quine.
- Who did Saul Kripke influence?
- No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on Saul Kripke.
- When did Saul Kripke live?
- 1940–2022. The map files Saul Kripke under the 20th century.
- How rare is the Saul Kripke card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Saul Kripke in 45 languages, which makes it a Rare card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016