Kripke

If you forced continentally inclined philosophers at gunpoint to name their favorite work of analytic philosophy, 90% would probably say something by Wittgenstein. Mine is Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, a work that has given genuine pleasure on every one of my multiple rereadings of it.

It’s now almost 40 years old, which by the rapid journal-debate pace of analytic philosophy makes it a fairly elderly classic by now. But I still get the sense that most people in the continental tradition still haven’t read it. I would urge readers of this blog to study that book. It may take you 20 or 30 pages to get used to the style, but in fact the style and content of the work are equally excellent: powerful, lucid, witty.

Since Meillassoux’s book appeared in 2006, we’ve all been speaking a lot about correlationism (which, some people still don’t realize, Meillassoux respects and radicalizes rather than disdains; I’m the one who disdains it). But I’m not sure if I could cite a better anti-correlationist work (even if avant la lettre) than Naming and Necessity. By my reading, correlationism lies in ruins by the end of Kripke’s book, though it continues to dominate continental thought in 2009.

The Derrideans tend to like Davidson; I myself do not. (In fact, I find Davidson rather annoying even in his attitude.) Lately there has been a growth in pro-Sellars continental sentiment, but it’s always seemed to me that Sellars like Quine is more important for his effects within the analytic universe than for enduring philosophical value per se (that’s a controversial view, I realize). Besides that, I find Quine to be a fairly desolate writer, and Sellars among the most wretched stylists I’ve ever read– in fact, it’s almost physically painful for me to read Sellars.

But Kripke, that’s a different story. In some ways his book only gets at one philosophical problem, but it’s such a central problem that everything is somehow transformed by what he does.

My Contemporary Philosophy syllabus usually goes: Heidegger/Levinas/Whitehead/Kripke. The choices are easy to explain… In my opinion, the two greatest philosophical books of the 20th century are Being and Time and Process and Reality. (Husserl’s Logical Investigations is close to that league, but there’s no way to do little bits of it in a 300-level class.) Levinas is a personal favorite of mine, and as a sort of ex-Heideggerian I admire Levinas’s unique blend of admiration/critique when it comes to Heidegger, and you all know as well I regard Levinas as the most innovative reader of Heidegger we have. That’s the way to get beyond Heidegger, not the other French ways. But alas, Levinas has been pigeonholed as a pious rabbi droning on about the Other. That’s OK; it will pass.

And I also do think that Naming and Necessity is one of the greatest works of 20th century philosophy. If it were longer and covered more topics it would rise even higher on the list, and is already probably one of the best five. (And for someone with my background, that’s saying something.)

I was just thinking of this because I found it helpful to reference Kripke in the final version of L’objet quadruple, Section 4D.