At the age of 82: philosopher Saul Kripke died

The American philosopher and logician Saul Kripke died on Thursday at the age of 82.

Kripke first studied mathematics at Harvard University.

The Long Island-born son of author Dorothy K. Kripke and Rabbi Myer Kripke published a work on modal logic at the age of eighteen.

From 1964 to 1966 Kripke taught philosophy at Princeton, from 1966 to 1968 at Harvard, and from 1968 to 1976 at Rockefeller University in New York.

From 1977 until his retirement twenty years later, Kripke was Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.

Among other things, Kripke has made a name for himself with work on the concepts of modal logic, i.e. the logic that deals with the possible consequences of being and its description.

In the 1960s he wrote three epoch-making texts on modal logic: The Undecidability of Monadic Modal Quantification Theory (1962), Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic I. Normal Modal Propositional Calculi (1963) and Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic II. Non-Normal Modal Propositional Calculi” (1965).

These deal with the question of whether a statement "possibly" or "necessarily" is true or false.

To this end, Kripke developed models that were named after him.

In 1972 he published a study on the semantics of proper names ("Naming and Necessity").

In 1982, Kripke presented his interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work ("Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language").