[HN Gopher] Saul Kripke has died
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Saul Kripke has died
Author : prvc
Score : 241 points
Date : 2022-09-17 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dailynous.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dailynous.com)
| chasingthewind wrote:
| When I was right out of college I worked with a guy who had a PhD
| in philosophy and had studied Kripke closely. He was working in
| software at the time because it's hard to make a living as a
| philosopher. He gave me one of his extra copies of Naming and
| Necessity. I had never read any philosophy and I was amazed.
|
| Kripke was truly a brilliant philosopher.
| routerl wrote:
| > He was working in software at the time because it's hard to
| make a living as a philosopher.
|
| Yeah, there are a lot of us. Spend a few years deeply studying
| logic and reasoning, and programming really just feels like a
| different version of the same thing.
|
| Learning an algorithm is very similar to learning an argument
| or a proof, and designing algorithms is very similar to
| designing arguments.
| fuy wrote:
| I think you've just discovered Curry-Howard isomorphism!
| lultimouomo wrote:
| > Yeah, there are a lot of us.
|
| I wouldn't say a lot, I've never met a fellow
| philosopher/developer in person. I would expect there would
| be more!
| csh0 wrote:
| I did a Philosophy/CS double major for undergrad. I work as
| an SRE now, but when I was in school there was one other
| student in my cohort who was also doing the same pairing,
| she intended to go work on machine ethics last I heard.
|
| There really are a number of delightful intersections
| between the two subjects and I have considered writing a
| book on them,"Philosophy for Computer Scientists" or
| perhaps "Computer Science for Philosophers" :)
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| Now maybe we can finally get our hands on the unpublished work!
|
| (This is a joke, but something I used to hear in philosophy is
| that kripke felt some of his drafts were "not ready" despite
| circulating since the 70's. The John Locke lectures are an
| example, I believe.)
| redtexture wrote:
| Unpublished essays are commonly circulated for commentary, and
| many are unpublished.
|
| This is a typical philosophical tradition.
|
| Many college professors have a library of essays of others'
| circulated and unpublished work.
| morelisp wrote:
| Most philosophers also publish quite a lot even while doing
| this. Kripke dominated the field while publishing almost
| nothing publicly.
| morelisp wrote:
| From one of the obits I learned the Locke lectures were finally
| published in 2013! In the early 2000s our prof handed out what
| I believe were a former colleague's xeroxed notes from them.
| jhickok wrote:
| There is a great podcast on this topic:
| https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/episode-61-jeff-
| buechn...
| wmorein wrote:
| It is very odd that the New York Times hasn't published an obit
| for him. Maybe they will take some time to do so but I always
| thought that they had these things pre-baked.
|
| I heard about his death elsewhere this morning and was surprised
| I didn't see it before. They have a ton of obits for less
| consequential people.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/section/obituaries
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| An influential and astonishing mind. Reading him in my 20s really
| changed my relationship with language. I owe him a debt as he
| changed my professional life.
|
| Yet nothing I've seen in the press has described his predation of
| women in the department. In fact I learned of it only later when
| speaking with female linguists.
|
| I heard him speak once and could have gone and spoken with him
| but turned down the opportunity. I'm male, but why should I then
| be so lucky to be able to have an ordinary conversation with him?
| gumby wrote:
| I know we're not supposed to talk about comment voting but I am
| disturbed that this on-topic comment was downvoted.
|
| His attitude towards women was notorious, and he didn't work
| with any as far as I know. I consider it's as much worth
| discussion as Heidegger's or Sartre's politics.
| Isaiah____ wrote:
| Great in all possible worlds.
| domenicrosati wrote:
| Well done
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Random question, but how is he related to Eric Kripke (from
| Supernatural/The Boys)? Assuming cousins or 2nd cousins?
| yung_steezy wrote:
| I remember studying Naming And Necessity in my undergrad and
| being blown away by the clarity of his arguments. It is an
| amazing skill to express oneself so concisely, and many of his
| arguments/thought experiments have a 'commonsense' quality to
| them that make them very persuasive.. By contrast other great
| philosophers of language like Wittgenstein had the insight but
| somewhat struggled to express it.
| pavlov wrote:
| "Wittgenstein somewhat struggled to express his insights" is a
| bit like "Kafka had certain reservations about society".
| hprotagonist wrote:
| how much clearer can you be than a nicely numbered list? :D
| archduck wrote:
| While writing the Tractatus in the trenches, even. Most
| people would be satisfied with a stream-of-consciousness
| brain dump, hoping that enough insights are contained
| within to justify one's work. Wittgenstein cooked it down
| to just seven terse statements and further terse sub-
| statements. And numbered them nicely. Who does that?
| eternalban wrote:
| "You will need a 64bit processor to run this program"
| archduck wrote:
| His teaching at Cambridge often had minutes-long silences, in
| which the class just had to wait for him to conclude his
| thoughts and resume teaching. It was apparently agonizing for
| some of his students.
|
| Especially since you probably didn't want to step on his toes
| by breaking the silence while he still held the floor - he
| was, after all, forced to retire from schoolteaching after
| beating one of his slower math students unconscious.
| Wistar wrote:
| "The Haidbauer incident, known in Austria as der Vorfall
| Haidbauer, took place in April 1926 when Josef Haidbauer,
| an 11-year-old schoolboy in Otterthal, Austria, reportedly
| collapsed unconscious after being hit on the head during
| class by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidbauer_incident
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| I don't entirely agree with some elements of Kripke's
| interpretation of Wittgenstein (I'm more partial to the Baker
| and Hacker position), but he was so important to keeping Witty
| in the discussion that it's hard to not give him enormous
| credit.
|
| As an aside, it is very interesting how many writers on
| Wittgenstein, and working in what we might broadly call
| Ordinary Language philosophy, achieve such a startling clarity.
| An early example (even before Wittgenstein) is also RG
| Collingwood. His writing is straightforward and clear as day,
| eschewing jargon for the language we use day to day, for _that_
| was ultimately their focus. They wanted to dissolve
| philosophical problems.
| lukeasrodgers wrote:
| Readers may enjoy the portmanteau that came from Kripke's
| interpretation of Wittgenstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Priv...
| aildours wrote:
| The bit about RG Collingwood sounds very interesting. Could
| you provide some examples?
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| His book _The Principles of Art_ from 1938 is probably the
| best example. He offers a definition of art arrived at
| through ordinary language philosophy, and, along the way,
| also develops a theory of imagination, language, and anti-
| copyright.
| aildours wrote:
| Thanks!
| daviddaviddavid wrote:
| I would add HP Grice to the list of startlingly clear
| ordinary language philosophers. His 1957 essay "Meaning" has
| this definition:
|
| "A means something by x" is equivalent to "A intended the
| utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means
| of the recognition of this intention".
|
| It may seem less than clear taken out of context, but there
| is a wonderful argument working toward the definition and
| once he finally presents it, it's a bit of a mic drop moment.
|
| Also, he is one of the few philosophers whose work proved to
| be foundational in linguistics. Any book/course in pragmatics
| will talk about Grice's work on implicature and background
| knowledge.
| jhickok wrote:
| A true genius of the sort that might come around every hundred
| years. I look forward to his literary estate going through his
| hundreds of boxes worth of papers and manuscripts and notes and
| publishing them over the next few decades.
| f-jin wrote:
| Recently been reading up on model checking, and Kripke structures
| are mentioned often. They are somewhat similar to Labeled
| Transition Systems, but then with propositions on the nodes
| instead of labels on the edges. Turns out they are named after
| this person, fascinating.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| They're named after Kripke for inventing them when he was in
| highschool. The kind of stuff that makes you feel woefully
| intellectually inadequate :-).
| xhevahir wrote:
| A philosopher at my alma mater wrote a controversial paper
| accusing Kripke of plagiarism. I'm not competent to weigh in on
| that question, but I thought this article was interesting:
| http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html
| justin66 wrote:
| The real crime here is Jim Holt's writing style.
| raincom wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. This piece helps me better understand the
| New theory of Reference, in the historical context.
|
| Here is the book where Soames, Smith engage with each other:
| https://www.amazon.com/New-Theory-Reference-Origins-Synthese...
| goldenkey wrote:
| Jim Holt's writing was gripping, read the whole affair. But now
| I'm left thinking that all this analysis of names is silly, and
| they are heavily overloaded and turing complete. Why even try
| to box them as something related to possible universes?
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Fascinating read even though I did not understand all of it.
| baremetal wrote:
| The man has just passed away and you drop a hit piece on him.
|
| edit: my mistake
| jhickok wrote:
| The linked article is not a hit piece on Kripke.
| odderik wrote:
| Not at all, and it was well worth the read - even for a
| non-philosopher.
| base698 wrote:
| I went to a Philosophy conference with a professor friend in the
| early 2000s. I was standing in a circle talking to about 10
| professors. All 10 had some anecdote of Kripke's brilliance with
| a few questioning why even stay in the field when you could never
| get to his level.
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