Saul Kripke is known as a brilliant logician and one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. While a high-school student in Nebraska, he wrote a series of papers that transformed modal logic and remain canonical works in the field. He became a junior fellow at Harvard in his sophomore year and gave lectures to graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the 1960s, Kripke presented his revolutionary theories of reference in a series of lectures, transcribed and published in 1980 as Naming and Necessity. This work sparked a veritable industry of philosophical commentary and criticism, as did another series of lectures, transcribed and published in 1982 as Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. In 2001, he won the Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, which is given by the Swedish Academy of Sciences and is the equivalent in its field of a Nobel Prize. He was on the faculty of Rockefeller University, was John Locke Lecturer at Oxford, A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, and a few years ago retired from Princeton, where he spent much of his career since 1976.

Photo: Peter Waldvogel