Everyone working in the central areas of philosophy must come to terms with Kripke`s ideas

A much-needed exposition and analysis of his work

Engaging, well-written, and clearly structured

Challenges received wisdom

Suitable for students and anyone else new to Kripke


Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke`s central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke`s views on rigid designation, causality and reference, the necessary and the contingent, the a posteriori and the a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke`s ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of `identitarian` and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens.

No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes`s book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world.

Readership: Scholars and advanced students of philosophy, particularly of metaphysics and philosophy of language.

Contents
1. Names
2. Necessity
3. Identity, Worlds, and Times
4. The Mental and the Physical