Philosophy of Language Problems Seminar

The seminar will be devoted mainly to the analysis and discussion of the book Naming and Necessity by the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its publication.

Naming and Necessity (1972/1980) is one of the most important works in contemporary philosophy of language and metaphysics, comparable in importance to the classic works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alfred Tarski. The book offers novel answers to fundamental philosophical questions such as:

• How do names refer to objects in the world?
• What is a necessary truth and how do we come to know it?
• Are all necessary truths knowable a priori?
• Do objects have essential properties?
• What are possible worlds?
• How can we obtain knowledge about them?
• What are the nature, sources, and varieties of linguistic representation?
• What is the relation of the mind and the brain?

The answers Naming and Necessity offers to these questions challenge philosophical theories of language and conceptions of metaphysics prevalent in the twentieth century, especially the descriptivist account of reference found, according to Kripke, in Frege, Wittgenstein, and Russell, as well as Quine's anti-essentialist metaphysics.