Saul Kripke Quotations

I just hate sitting and writing - I had to do that in school. Plus, I have terrible handwriting.

Proper names are rigid designators.

In fact, of course, I hold that propositions that contemporary philosophers would properly count as 'empirical' can be necessary and be known to be such.

For a sensation to be felt as pain is for it to be pain

I am somewhat uncertain whether there is a definite factual question as to whether natural language handles truth-value gaps ... Nor am I even quite sure that there is a definite question of fact as to whether natural language should be evaluated by the minimal fixed point or another, given the choice of a scheme for handling gaps. We are not at the moment searching for the correct scheme.

I wish I could have skipped college.

Certainly the philosopher of 'possible worlds' must take care that his technical apparatus not push him to ask questions whose meaningfulness is not supported by our original intuitions of possibility that gave the apparatus its point.

Let's call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a non-rigid or accidental designator if that is not the case. Of course we don't require that the objects exist in all possible worlds.... When we think of a property as essential to an object we usually mean that it is true of that object in any case where it would have existed. A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid.

It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong.

Logical investigations can obviously be a useful tool for philosophy. They must, however, be informed by a sensitivity to the philosophical significance of the formalism and by a generous admixture of common sense, as well as a thorough understanding both of the basic concepts and of the technical details of the formal material used. It should not be supposed that the formalism can grind out philosophical results in a manner beyond the capacity of ordinary philosophical reasoning. There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy.