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Saul Kripke has died
- Isaiah____ 4y agoGreat in all possible worlds.
- domenicrosati 4y agoWell done
- chasingthewind 4y agoWhen I was right out of college I worked with a guy who had a PhD in philosophy and had studied Kripke closely. He was working in software at the time because it’s hard to make a living as a philosopher. He gave me one of his extra copies of Naming and Necessity. I had never read any philosophy and I was amazed. Kripke was truly a brilliant philosopher.
- routerl 4y ago> He was working in software at the time because it’s hard to make a living as a philosopher. Yeah, there are a lot of us. Spend a few years deeply studying logic and reasoning, and programming really just feels like a different version of the same thing. Learning an algorithm is very similar to learning an argument or a proof, and designing algorithms is very similar to designing arguments.
- fuy 4y agoI think you've just discovered Curry-Howard isomorphism!
- lultimouomo 4y ago> Yeah, there are a lot of us. I wouldn't say a lot, I've never met a fellow philosopher/developer in person. I would expect there would be more!
- csh0 4y agoI did a Philosophy/CS double major for undergrad. I work as an SRE now, but when I was in school there was one other student in my cohort who was also doing the same pairing, she intended to go work on machine ethics last I heard. There really are a number of delightful intersections between the two subjects and I have considered writing a book on them,“Philosophy for Computer Scientists” or perhaps “Computer Science for Philosophers” :)
- leoc 4y agoGood Lord I wish more people understood which elements of RDBs are essential features of the logic they’re based on; which ones are results of the way the relational model screwed up the logic it was supposed to be based on (hello there, Closed World Assumption); which ones are results of the way SQL screwed up the relational model; and which ones are just elements of a performance and security model that is quite independent of the logic (eg. there’s nothing in the logic which dictates that adding a row is routine but adding a table is a Big Deal). It probably doesn’t qualify as a delightful subject, but it would be a great service if someone could explain this stuff to people.
- therealdrag0 4y agoI minored in philosophy. Was tempted to go all the way. But money. And I always did love computers.
- yung_steezy 4y agoI remember studying Naming And Necessity in my undergrad and being blown away by the clarity of his arguments. It is an amazing skill to express oneself so concisely, and many of his arguments/thought experiments have a 'commonsense' quality to them that make them very persuasive.. By contrast other great philosophers of language like Wittgenstein had the insight but somewhat struggled to express it.
- pavlov 4y ago“Wittgenstein somewhat struggled to express his insights” is a bit like “Kafka had certain reservations about society”.
- hprotagonist 4y agohow much clearer can you be than a nicely numbered list? :D
- eternalban 4y ago"You will need a 64bit processor to run this program"
- archduck 4y agoWhile writing the Tractatus in the trenches, even. Most people would be satisfied with a stream-of-consciousness brain dump, hoping that enough insights are contained within to justify one's work. Wittgenstein cooked it down to just seven terse statements and further terse sub-statements. And numbered them nicely. Who does that?
- archduck 4y agoHis teaching at Cambridge often had minutes-long silences, in which the class just had to wait for him to conclude his thoughts and resume teaching. It was apparently agonizing for some of his students. Especially since you probably didn't want to step on his toes by breaking the silence while he still held the floor - he was, after all, forced to retire from schoolteaching after beating one of his slower math students unconscious.
- base698 4y agoI went to a Philosophy conference with a professor friend in the early 2000s. I was standing in a circle talking to about 10 professors. All 10 had some anecdote of Kripke's brilliance with a few questioning why even stay in the field when you could never get to his level.
- f-jin 4y agoRecently been reading up on model checking, and Kripke structures are mentioned often. They are somewhat similar to Labeled Transition Systems, but then with propositions on the nodes instead of labels on the edges. Turns out they are named after this person, fascinating.
- the-smug-one 4y agoThey're named after Kripke for inventing them when he was in highschool. The kind of stuff that makes you feel woefully intellectually inadequate :-).
- xhevahir 4y agoA philosopher at my alma mater wrote a controversial paper accusing Kripke of plagiarism. I'm not competent to weigh in on that question, but I thought this article was interesting: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whose.html
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jhickok 4y agoA true genius of the sort that might come around every hundred years. I look forward to his literary estate going through his hundreds of boxes worth of papers and manuscripts and notes and publishing them over the next few decades.
- huitzitziltzin 4y agoNow maybe we can finally get our hands on the unpublished work! (This is a joke, but something I used to hear in philosophy is that kripke felt some of his drafts were “not ready” despite circulating since the 70’s. The John Locke lectures are an example, I believe.)
- morelisp 4y agoFrom one of the obits I learned the Locke lectures were finally published in 2013! In the early 2000s our prof handed out what I believe were a former colleague’s xeroxed notes from them.
- jhickok 4y agoThere is a great podcast on this topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/episode-61-jeff-buechner-discusses-kripke-functionalism/id323127331?i=1000316632186 https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/episode-61-jeff-buechn...
- raincom 4y agoThank you for sharing this podcast. It is helpful to understand functionalism in the historical context.
- redtexture 4y agoUnpublished essays are commonly circulated for commentary, and many are unpublished. This is a typical philosophical tradition. Many college professors have a library of essays of others' circulated and unpublished work.
- morelisp 4y agoMost philosophers also publish quite a lot even while doing this. Kripke dominated the field while publishing almost nothing publicly.
- wmorein 4y agoIt is very odd that the New York Times hasn't published an obit for him. Maybe they will take some time to do so but I always thought that they had these things pre-baked. I heard about his death elsewhere this morning and was surprised I didn't see it before. They have a ton of obits for less consequential people. https://www.nytimes.com/section/obituaries https://www.nytimes.com/section/obituaries
- gumby 4y agoAn influential and astonishing mind. Reading him in my 20s really changed my relationship with language. I owe him a debt as he changed my professional life. Yet nothing I've seen in the press has described his predation of women in the department. In fact I learned of it only later when speaking with female linguists. I heard him speak once and could have gone and spoken with him but turned down the opportunity. I'm male, but why should I then be so lucky to be able to have an ordinary conversation with him?
- gumby 4y agoI know we're not supposed to talk about comment voting but I am disturbed that this on-topic comment was downvoted. His attitude towards women was notorious, and he didn't work with any as far as I know. I consider it's as much worth discussion as Heidegger's or Sartre's politics.
- nsajko 4y agoDidn't down vote, but a possible reason for doing that would be that "his predation of women in the department" is accusatory but vague. It speaks ill of Kripke, but if you disagree with the statement there's no point in replying to it because the statement itself basically isn't refutable.
- gumby 4y agoThanks. I think it's reasonable to ask an epistemic question about such an assertion. People sometimes respond with a single-word comment, "Source?", which sparks such a thread. Despite its brevity I (and apparently most HN readers) consider it a substantive comment. In the case of my GP comment, I mentioned how I learned of it with that in mind. In my case, still hearsay of course.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoRandom question, but how is he related to Eric Kripke (from Supernatural/The Boys)? Assuming cousins or 2nd cousins?