Saul Kripke

Saul Kripke was an American philosopher and logician whose work on modal logic and the theory of reference transformed analytic philosophy. His lectures Naming and Necessity revived essentialism and changed how philosophers think about identity, necessity, and language.

Kripke's distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators, and his argument that names refer directly rather than through descriptions, overturned the Frege–Russell view that had dominated philosophy of language. His Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language generated a new debate about rule-following and meaning.