Kripke’s Logic: 𝔗𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔰𝔷𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔢 𝔏𝔬𝔤𝔦𝔨

CHRISTOPHER RICHARD WADE DETTLING (2019–2024)

I flatter myself as the first Hegelian philosopher ever to apply the dialectic of Hegel to the Hegelian dialectic

Logic is not a theory but a reflection of the world. Logic is transcendental. Wittgenstein¹

No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy … Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true. Russell²

In a general way, therefore, I propose in this introductory chapter to ponder our talk of physical phenomena as a physical phenomenon, and our scientific imaginings as activities with the world that we imagine. Quine³

That, too, is an issue I do not want to go into in detail except to be very dogmatic about it. It was I think settled quite well by Bertrand Russell in his notion of the scope of a description … I just dogmatically want to drop that question here. Kripke⁴

The theory of value is treated here with the standards of rigor of the contemporary formalist school of mathematics. Debreu⁵

INTRODUCTION: KRIPKE AND MODERN IRRATIONALISM

1/ Henry Allison’s Kantian transcendental ratiocination, as the application of the outdated and surpassed transcendental method in the field of academic scholarship, based upon his transcendental Archimedian foundation of Transzendentale Logik, is another instance of twentieth century analytico–logico–linguistic Neo–Kantianism paraded in the garb of epistemology, phenomenology, existentialism, empiricism, realism and so forth, imported from European modernity into the American world by the schools of Quine, Kripke, Chomsky and Rorty, — following in the sophistical footsteps of the modern unreason of Locke, Leibniz, Hume and Kant, sophisters of the master race. Kantians like Saul Kripke seriously argue that the evils of the twentieth century might never have even happened because “Hitler might have spent all his days in quiet in Linz.”¹ “[Hitler’s] most important properties consist … in his murderous political role … [Hitler] might have lacked these properties altogether.”² The reason that Hitler’s Holocaust might never have even happened, according to Saul Kripke, is that there exists a theoretical (imaginary) world wherein people like Adolf Hitler “could have had careers completely different from their actual ones.”³ From within the (relative) safety of his analytico–logico–linguistic and Hitlerian fortress, Kripke maintains that “a designator is rigid, and designates the same thing in all possible worlds.”⁴ Professor Kripke spent many years at Harvard, and other schools, adumbrating this Kantian sophistry, wherein Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa coexist in perfect Kripkean–established harmony, for after all, the latter might never have been a saint, — but perhaps a close friend of Herr Goebbels? Wherever this strange world of Doktor Kripke may or may not actually be, whether on the side of phantasy or reality, his sophistical doctrine of “rigid designation and rigid designator” is drenched with the blood of exact historiography and world history: “Reinster Idealismus deckt sich unbewußt mit tiefster Erkenntnis.”⁵

I. KRIPKE AND CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY: ANGLO–AMERICAN NEO–KANTIANISM

2/ Saul Kripke is a follower of Immanuel Kant, albeit in the fashion of Anglo–American Kantian anti–Hegelianism, following in the footsteps of British Neo–Kantianism, advanced by Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein (Ayer, Ryle and Strawson), — oftentimes placed in stark contradistinction to Anglo–Saxon “Neo–Hegelianism” or British Idealism. Bertrand Russell for some years spread his version of Cosmopolitanism (Liberal Internationalism as pacifism) in the United States via his “logico–linguistic philosophy,” and attracted many followers. Saul Kripke’s Kantianism springs from the European Neo–Kantian tradition of early twentieth century positivism, especially as found in the works of Anglo–Saxon “analytical philosophers” and the Vienna Circle.¹ Kripke follows Quine, at whose hands the Anglo–Saxon Neo–Kantian question, “How are synthetic a priori statements possible?” becomes “How are contingent identity statements possible?” Following Quine’s rejection of the central question of British Neo–Kantianism, “How are synthetic a priori statements possible?” Saul Kripke is an epigone of analytico–logico–linguistic Neo–Kantianism in the postwar world of “contemporary philosophy”: The Anglo–Saxon distinction between Critique (transcendental epistemology and metaphysics) and dogmatism (traditional metaphysics) is renewed by Saul Kripke as the epistemic power (“epistemic situations”) of his modal logic, i.e., transcendental ratiocination as the Neo–Kantian transcendentalism of Kant’s Transzendentale Logik, — the subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism of European modernity.

3/ Kripke espouses Bertrand Russell’s analytico–logico–linguistic sophism of self–identity:

“According to Russell, one can, for example, say with propriety that the author of Hamlet might not have written ‘Hamlet,’ or even that the author of Hamlet might not have been the author of ‘Hamlet.’ Now here, of course, we do not deny the necessity of the identity of an object with itself; but we say it is true concerning a certain man that he in fact was the unique person to have written ‘Hamlet’ and secondly that the man, who in fact was the man who wrote ‘Hamlet,’ might not have written ‘Hamlet.’ In other words, if Shakespeare had decided not to write tragedies, he might not have written ‘Hamlet.’ Under these circumstances, the man who in fact wrote ‘Hamlet’ would not have written ‘Hamlet.’ Russell brings this out by saying that in such a statement, the first occurrence of the description ‘the author of ‘Hamlet’’ has large scope. That is, we say ‘The author of ‘Hamlet’ has the following property: That he might not have written ‘Hamlet.’’ We do not assert that the following statement might have been the case, namely that the author of ‘Hamlet’ did not write ‘Hamlet,’ for that is not true. That would be to say that it might have been the case that someone wrote ‘Hamlet’ and yet did not write ‘Hamlet,’ which would be a contradiction. Now, aside from the details of Russell’s particular formulation [139] of it, which depends on his theory of descriptions, this seems to be the distinction that any theory of descriptions has to make.”² [Italics added]

4/ From whence comes Bertrand Russell’s sophistical (transcendental) version of self–identity? The Kantian anti–Hegelian and early Kantio–Hegelian basis of Russell’s sophistical self–identification (the outdated and surpassed Russellian doctrine of self–consciousness in the world of today, i.e., the Anglo–Saxon version of modern European Egoity), is the fountainhead of Saul Kripke’s Transzendentale Logik of self–identificiation (necessitation and identification), — which comes from the former’s German Social Democracy:

“[Hegel] was great, on the one hand by his metaphysical results, on the other by his logical method; on the one hand as the crown of dogmatic philosophy, on the other as the founder of the dialectic, with its then revolutionary doctrine of historical development. Both these aspects of Hegel’s work revolutionized thought … the practical tendency of his metaphysics was, and is, to glorify existing institutions, to see in Church and State the objective embodiment of the Absolute Idea, his dialectic method tended to exhibit no proposition as unqualified truth, no state of things as final perfection … The validity of this view we need not here examine; it is sufficient to point out that Hegel, in his ‘Philosophy of History,’ endeavored to exhibit the actual course of the world as following the same necessary chain of development which, as it exists in thought, forms the subject of his logic … the development of the world therefore proceeds by action and reaction, or, in technical language, by thesis and antithesis, and these become reconciled in a higher unity, the synthesis of both … we might live to see another French Revolution, perhaps even more glorious than the first, leaving Social Democracy to try one of the greatest and most crucial experiments in political history.”³ [Italics added]

The embryonic Russellian logical and linguistic distinction between critical (epistemology as transcendental) philosophy and dogmatic metaphysics is infected with pseudo–Hegelianism and anti–Hegelianism, which he inherits from Karl Marx and German Social Democracy, and which will corrupt his thought until the very end: Bertrand Russell’s sophistical philosophy is inscribed (conceptualized) within the universal historical struggle between Kant and Hegel (reason and unreason), within the collapse of European modernity and rise of American Liberty as the planetary freedom of Western (Judeo Christian) civilization in the world of today, as the America First Globalism of 21st century American Idealism.

5/ Bertrand Russell’s analytico–logico–linguistic brand of modern European freedom, inherited from his early reading of the German social democratic version of the French revolutionary Liberté (Bonapartism and Machiavellianism), leads him astray in the world historical arena of twentieth century politics and economics:

“The United States … imposes intolerable regimes on Asian, Latin American, and Middle East countries, and economically exploits the great majority of mankind who live at below–subsistence level[s] to support American profit … The American government pursues a policy of genocide.”⁴

KRIPKE’S ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY: ANALYTICITY AND MEANING

6/ Kripke “stipulates” (asserts) that an analytic statement is in some sense true by virtue of its meaning and true in all possible worlds by virtue of its meaning. Then something which is analytically true will be both necessary and a priori:

“Let’s just make it a matter of stipulation that an analytic statement is in some sense true by virtue of its meaning and true in all possible worlds by virtue of its meaning. Then something which is analytically true will be both necessary and a priori. (That’s sort of stipulative.) … When I hear the name ‘Hitler,’ I do feel it’s sort of analytic that that man was evil. But really, probably not. Hitler might have spent all his days in quiet in Linz.”⁵

7/ Saul Kripke proclaims (stipulates) that analyticity is related in a Kripkean way to his brand (“contemporary philosophy”) of necessity and a prioricity: The Kripkean version of analytic philosophy (analyticity of contemporary philosophy) is based upon his version of the meaning of “the” world, i.e., possible worlds. But does Kripke really and truly “stipulate” after all? — for some proclamations are sheer nonsense, and sometimes pure evil, like the erstwhile decrees of Nazidom: On this last point, namely an exposition of the rational conception of stipulation, Kripke is silent. Kripke renovates Anglo–American Neo–Kantianism following in the footsteps of Quine, he rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic of European modernity: In the English–speaking world this rearrangement is world historical, in the twentieth century clash between Western Marxism and Soviet imperialism as Global communism, as the strife between republicanism and monarchism unchained by the struggle between the Industrial and French revolutions, — as the collapse of European modernity and rise of world civilization as the supremacy of American Liberty. The Digital revolution is the rational reconciliation of the Industrial and French revolutions in the name of American political economy, the bastion of Americanism as Global civilization.

8/ The law of substitutivity of identity says, according to Saul Kripke, epistemologically speaking and in stark contradistinction to metaphysical talk (i.e., Kantio–Hegelianism and a fortiori Hegelian anti–Kantianism), that (1) for any objects x and y, if x is identical to y then x has a certain property F, so does y, on the other hand, (2) every object is surely “necessarily self–identical,” we can conclude that, (3) for every x and y, if x equals y, then it is necessary that x equals y because (4) the conditional drops out because it is known to be true: Epistemologically speaking (in the tradition of Anglo–American Kantian anti–Hegelianism, as opposed to British Neo–Hegelianism), and opposed to dogmatic metaphysical speech (i.e., Kantio–Hegelianism and a fortiori Hegelian anti–Kantianism), it is necessary that x equals y, i.e., the necessity of equality and identity is epistemic, — the necessity of self–identity, in the renewed analytico–logico–linguistic language of Saul Kripke, is the epistemic power of transcendental ratiocination as the Neo–Kantian transcendentalism of Kant’s Transzendentale Logik, — the subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism of European modernity. As in the Kantian traditions, Saul Kripke identifies modality with epistemology:

“[135] A problem which has arisen frequently in contemporary philosophy is: ‘How are contingent identity statements possible?’ This question is phrased by analogy with the way Kant phrased his question ‘How are synthetic a priori statements possible?’ In both cases, it has usually been taken for granted in the one case by Kant that synthetic a priori judgments were possible, and in the other case in contemporary philosophical literature that contingent statements of identity are possible … in the case of contingent statements of identity, most philosophers have felt that the notion of a contingent identity statement ran into something like the following paradox. An argument [i.e., Kripke’s preferred meaning of modal symbolism] like the following can be given against the possibility of contingent identity statements: [136] First, the law of substitutivity of identity says that, for any objects x and y, if x is identical to y then x has a certain property F, so does y: (1) (x)(y) [(x = y) ⊃ (Fx ⊃ Fy)] On the other hand, every object is surely necessarily self–identical: (2) (x) ☐ (x = x) But (3) (x)(y) (x = y) ⊃ [☐ (x = x) ⊃ ☐ (x = y)] is a substitution instance of (1), the substitutivity law. From (2) and (3), we can conclude that, for every x and y, if x equals y, then, it is necessary that x equals y: (4) (x)(y) ((x = y) ⊃ ☐ (x = y)) This is because the clause ☐ (x = x) of the conditional drops out because it is known to be true. This is an argument which has been stated many times in philosophy. Its conclusion, however, has often been regarded as highly paradoxical … what really is possible is that people (or some rational sentient beings) could have been in the same epistemic situation as we actually are, and identify [163] a phenomenon in the same way we identify heat, namely, by feeling it by the sensation we call ‘the sensation of heat,’ without the phenomenon being molecular motion.”⁶

9/ Saul Kripke uses his analytico–logico–linguistic vocabulary to hide his epistemological talk, i.e., his verbiage obscures the fact that he means the necessity of equality and identity as epistemic (the necessity of self–identity) is the epistemic power of transcendental ratiocination. Formula (4) asserts, says Kripke, that if x has this property (of necessary identity with x), trivially everything identical with x has it. Kripke himself asserts that the epistemological meaning of formula (4) is that if x has this property (of necessary identity with x), trivially everything identical with x has it: It really and truly is the epistemological case, says Saul Kripke, that the formula in question means if x has this property (of necessary identity with x), trivially everything identical with x has it, — but always in the special “epistemological” sense that Kripke means by “necessary identity.” Saul Kripke hides and obscures the epistemological “truth and reality” of the meanings he gives to his symbolic arrangements: The epistemological “truth and reality” of the meanings given to symbolic arrangements in the work of Saul Kripke is hidden and obscured by the usage of analytico–logico–linguistic language. The epistemological structure of Kripkean “truth and reality” is covertly imposed upon “modal” symbolism via the analytico–logico–linguistic verbiage of Anglo–Saxon Neo–Kantianism, allegedly renovated in the name of “contemporary philosophy.”

“Let us interpret necessity here weakly. We can count statements as necessary if whenever the objects mentioned therein exist, the statement would be true. If we wished to be very careful about this, we would have to go into the question of existence as a predicate and ask if the statement can be reformulated in the form: For every x it is necessary that, if x exists, then x is self–identical. I will not go into this particular form of subtlety here … If x and y are the same things and we can talk about modal properties of an object at all, that is, in the usual parlance, we can speak of modality in re and an object necessarily having certain properties as such, then formula (1), I think, has to hold. Where x is any property at all, a property involving modal operators, and if x and y are the same object and x has a certain property F, then y has to have the same property F. And this is so even if the property F is itself of the form of necessarily having some other property G, in particular that of necessarily being identical to a certain object. Well, I will not discuss the formula (4) itself because by itself it does not assert, of any particular true statement of identity, that is is necessary. It does not say anything about statements at all. It says for every object x and object y, if x and y are the same object, then it is necessary that x and y are the same object. And this, I think, if we think about it (anyway, if someone does not think so, I will not argue for it here), really [138] amounts to something very little different from the statement (2) … So if x has this property (of necessary identity with x), trivially everything identical with x has it, as (4) asserts. But, from statement (4) one may apparently be able to deduce various particular statements of identity must be necessary and this is then supposed to be a very paradoxical consequence.”⁷

10/ And we are dealing with epistemic truth and reality as Kripke emphasizes:

“[137] It really depends upon one’s philosophical view… Nor am I really going to consider formula (4) ... This, I think, if we think about it (anyway, if someone does not think so, I will not argue for it here), really [138] amounts to something very little different from the statement (2) … [148] I think it really comes from the idea of possible worlds as existing out there ... we really mean ‘Some man, other than Nixon, but closely resembling him, would have gotten some judge, other than Carswell but closely resembling him, through’ … [162] we cannot say the case where you seem to imagine the identity statement false is really an illusion … What really is possible is that people (or some rational sentient beings) could have been in the same epistemic situation as we actually are.”⁸

11/ Saul Kripke frames the debate over the scientific nature of Neo–Kantianism in terms of his own updated analytico–logico–linguistic version of Kant’s transcendentalism: “I do not intend to deal with the Kantian question … I will not discuss who was right on the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments.”⁹ The reason Kripke will not discuss who was right on the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, is because he advances his own updated version of Kant’s transcendentalism in the guise of “epistemology,” and thereby transcends Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein (albeit imaginatively and intuitively, i.e., transcendentally), since he rejects their versions of possibility (following in the footsteps of Quine), namely the ways in which they answered the question “How are synthetic a priori statements possible?” The struggle between Kant and Hegel on the stage of world history, the world historical matrix of the dynamism of phasality itself, in the clash between Kantian anti–Hegelianism and Kantio–Hegelianism is hereby exemplified: Saul Kripke does not abandon the erstwhile Neo–Kantianism of European modernity in his “transcendence” of the Anglo–Saxon version of British Kantianism (the distinction between Critique and dogmatism from the transcendental structure within Kant’s phenomenal and noumenal worlds), especially as found in the early and later works of Wittgenstein (we reject the Kantian distinction between the young and mature Wittgenstein of Gertrude Anscombe and company, based upon transcendental hermeneutics and philology), but rather adapts the sophistical philosophy of Liberal Internationalism to the new conditions of 1960s America:

“So, it might be thought, to imagine a situation in which heat would not have been the motion of molecules, we need only imagine a situation in which we would have had the very same sensation and it would have been produced by something other than the motion of molecules. Similarly, if we wanted to imagine a situation in which light was not a stream of photons, we could imagine a situation in which we were sensitive to something else in exactly the same way, producing what we call visual experiences, though not through a stream of photons.”¹⁰

12/ We shall discover that Transcendental Egoity, — “I apply the term transcendental to all knowledge which is not so much occupied with objects as with the mode of our cognition of these objects, so far as this mode of cognition is possible a priori,” — is hidden behind Saul Kripke’s mask of imagination and intuition, and is re–branded as “psychology” (meaning: Kripkean epistemology), i.e., transcendental ratiocination is the ultimate ground of Saul Kripke’s modal logic.¹¹

“One of the intuitive theses I will maintain in these talks is that names are rigid designators. [259] Certainly they seem to satisfy the intuitive test mentioned above … I will argue, intuitively, that proper names are rigid designators … [261] It just is not, in any intuitive sense of necessity, a necessary truth that Aristotle had the properties commonly attributed to him.”¹²

13/ The mode of “cognition” of Kripkean designative logic is imaginative, intuitive and “psychological,” i.e., transcendental in the Kantian sense: Transcendental “knowledge” is occupied with the mode of our cognition of objects, i.e., the mode of cognition of Transcendental Egoity. Transcendental Egoity is the metaphysical ground (Kripkean Egoity: “I think, imagine and intuit”) of Kantian epistemology (Kripkean imagination and intuition) as transcendental ratiocination. Kripkean transcendental ratiocination is therefore mortally infected with modern European subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism (especially as found in Russell, Wittgenstein and Quine), — the backbone of twentieth century Liberal Internationalism as Bonapartism and Machiavellianism, namely the power of the people and tyranny of the masses. America’s weakness in the age of twenty–first century Digital revolution is precisely the erstwhile political and economic maladiction of modern European irrationalism, albeit as advanced by Quine, Kripke, Chomsky and Rorty, — the last remnants of Kantian anti–Hegelianism and Kantio–Hegelianism in the Western world of today.

II. WITTGENSTEIN’S EPISTEMOLOGY: PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY AND MATHEMATICS

14/ Saul Kripke advances his own updated version of Kant’s transcendentalism, via his new Quinean question “How are contingent identity statements possible?” In other words, Kripke’s epistemological brand of possible worlds (possibility) is garbed in the verbiage of “modal logic,” which is justified via Kant’s transcendental method (Transzendentale Logik), the transcendental logic of transcendental egoity, which Saul Kripke renames as “imagination,” — which he inherited from Wittgenstein’s “psychology of mathematics,” via his so–called interpretation of the latter’s “private language argument” as mathematical epistemology (philosophical psychology), i.e., Neo–Kantianism as the subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism of modern European unreason:

“[vii] I stress the strong connection in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy between the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mathematics … Since I first encountered the ‘private language argument’ and the later Wittgenstein generally, and since I came to think about it in the way expounded here (1962–3), his work on rules has occupied a more central position in discussions of [ix] Wittgenstein’s later work … [1] Most of the exposition which follows occurred to the present writer some time ago, in the academic year 1962–3. At that time this approach to Wittgenstein’s views struck the present writer with the force of a revelation: what had previously seemed to me to be a somewhat loose argument for a fundamentally implausible conclusion based on dubious and controversial premises now appeared to me to be a powerful argument, even if the conclusions seemed even more radical and, in a sense, more implausible, than before. I thought at the time that I had seen Wittgenstein’s argument from an angle and emphasis very different from the approach which dominated standard expositions. Over the years I came to have doubts. First of all, at times I became unsure that I could formulate Wittgenstein’s elusive position as a clear argument. Second, the elusive nature of the subject made it possible to interpret some of the standard literature as perhaps seeing the argument in the same way after all.”¹

15/ “Wittgenstein’s views … appeared to me to be a powerful argument … over the years I came to have doubts”: Saul Kripke’s doubts concerning Wittgenstein’s powerful argumentation are based upon his attribution of a strong connection between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and the philosophy of psychology, as well as the philosophy of mathematics. In other words, Kripke’s own doubt over Wittgenstein’s “elusive nature,” his “elusive position,” casts a pall over the entire Kripkean project of rehabilitating and renovating the analytical (Neo–Kantian) tradition in the name of modal logic, — i.e., salvaging Kant’s Transzendentale Logik in its Anglo–Saxon form, from the world historical rubble of European modernity. The irrational nature of the transcendental connexions between philosophy, psychology and mathematics in Wittgenstein, casts doubt, in the mind of Kripke himself, upon his own analytico–logico–linguistic project.

16/ Saul Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, as briefly outlined historically in 1982, stresses the “strong connection in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy between the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mathematics.” Most of Kripke’s 1982 book comes from his early sixties interpretation of Wittgenstein. But Kripke did not always interpret Wittgenstein this way: “Since I first encountered the ‘private language argument’ and the later Wittgenstein generally, and since I came to think about it [the private language argument] in the way expounded here (1962–3).” The general distinction that Saul Kripke draws in 1982 between the earlier and later Wittgenstein, he did not draw before 1962, before his early sixties interpretation: For Kripke himself says, “since I first encountered the ‘private language argument’ and the later Wittgenstein generally.”² Before 1962, according to Kripkean historiography in 1982, Saul Kripke makes a special distinction between the earlier and later Wittgenstein’s epistemology, otherwise he makes no distinction whatsoever.

17/ Saul Kripke distinguishes here between when he first encountered Wittgenstein (the “private language argument”) and when he encountered the later Wittgenstein generally: “Wittgenstein’s views … had previously seemed to me to be a somewhat loose argument for a fundamentally implausible conclusion based on dubious and controversial premises.” In other words, when Kripke first encounters his Wittgensteinian interpretation of the “private language argument” (this approach to Wittgenstein’s views),he does not draw the general distinction between the early and later Wittgenstein: Kripke’s original interpretation of Wittgenstein, antecedent to 1962, is not the interpretation found in his 1982 book, — wherein we find a “strong connection in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy between the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mathematics.” Kripke says “since I came to think about it” (since 1962), so that he means Wittgenstein’s private language argument: “Since I first encountered the ‘private language argument’ and the later Wittgenstein generally.” At this juncture, before 1962 Kripke did indeed think about Wittgenstein’s private language argument (1982), albeit in terms of Wittgenstein’s views: “A somewhat loose argument for a fundamentally implausible conclusion based on dubious and controversial premises.” The young versus the mature Kripke are historically distinguished in 1982 via the logical and hermeneutical difference between Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views versus his private language argument, i.e., as the Kripkean hermeneutical distinction between Wittgenstein’s loose and powerful argument in Saul Kripke’s 1982 intellectual autobiography, — as the Kripkean opposition between the early and later Wittgenstein. The exact philological and hermeneutical interpretation of the historical development of Kripkeanism as Transzendentale Logik, the rational distinction between the young and mature Kripke as a vanishing phase of universal history, is indeed based upon the intellectual autobiography of Saul Kripke, as inscribed within the collapse of European modernity and rise of Americanism in the world of today.

18/ Of course we equate the “private language argument” (the Wittgensteinian phraseology of the mature Kripke), with the Wittgenstein of the young Kripke, rather than with the tendentious assertions of the autobiographical historian, since we understand by that subjectivist, relativist and irrationalist phrase precisely the specter of modern irrationalism that haunts Kripke’s “modal logic.” Recapitulation: Kripke’s first version of Wittgenstein (before 1962), from which he inherits the fundaments of his own epistemological irrationalism (which is recast in 1982 as Wittgenstein’s “private language argument”), is first read without the general distinction between the earlier and later Wittgenstein (as propounded in 1982). Once Kripke is in possession after 1962 of the general distinction between the early and later Wittgenstein, he discovers a “strong connection in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy between the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mathematics.” In other words, Wittgenstein’s transcendental epistemology is recast by the mature Kripke in 1982, via his distinction between the early and later Wittgenstein, as a “private language argument,” i.e., in terms of psychology and mathematics: The logic of transcendental egoity, in the hands of Saul Kripke (1982), via his telescopic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s epistemology, becomes the historical logic behind the autobiographical development of Kripkean “psychology and mathematics.”

19/ There is some reason to doubt the significance of Kripke’s tale with regards to the influence of the “late” Wittgenstein upon his own epistemological irrationalism: We attribute a slightly different meaning to Kripke’s words, one that casts some doubt upon the meaning of his biographical reminiscences of events 20 years before. Perhaps today, he can clarify events from 50 years past?In 1962, Wittgenstein’s views struck Kripke with the “force of a revelation” — at least from the vantage of 1982: “What had previously [pre–1962] seemed to me to be a somewhat loose argument for a fundamentally implausible conclusion based on dubious and controversial premises now [1962] appeared to me to be a powerful argument.” Kripke’s pre–1962 interpretation of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical argument” (from the heights of 1982) without the general distinction between the early and later Wittgenstein, “had previously seemed to me to be a somewhat loose argument for a fundamentally implausible conclusion based on dubious and controversial premises.” The implication is that once in possession of the general distinction between the early and later Wittgenstein, key elements of the latter’s “philosophy” acquire new light in the eyes of the young Saul Kripke, such that he finds a “strong connection in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy between the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mathematics.” In other words, the epistemological irrationalism of the young Wittgenstein is somehow overcome in the later Wittgenstein’s “philosophical and mathematical psychology.” We may rightly infer from these words, that the epistemology of Naming and Necessity is informed by the “philosophical and mathematical psychology” of Kripke’s later Wittgenstein, but not the irrationalism of the early one, — at least within the mind of the mature Kripke of 1982. This reading, however, appears qualified by Kripke himself as doubtful: “Over the years I came to have doubts.” But what exactly does the mature Kripke doubt with regard to his 1962 interpretation of Wittgenstein? In 1962, says Kripke in 1982, the conclusions of his version of the later Wittgenstein “seemed even more radical and, in a sense, more implausible, than before” (“I had seen Wittgenstein’s argument from an angle and emphasis very different from the approach which dominated standard expositions”), namely, the “strong connection in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy between the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mathematics.” In 1982 Saul Kripke doubts the “implausibility” he once attributed to his post–1962 interpretation of the later Wittgenstein’s “strong connection.” In 1982 Kripke still espouses the “late” Wittgenstein’s epistemology as “logical” (“Wittgenstein has more than one way of arguing for a given conclusion, and even of presenting a single argument”), and yet he doubts his post–1962 doubts in the name of “elusiveness,” but he still interprets a “strong connection in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy between the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of mathematics.” Yet, before and after 1962, Kripke still doubted the plausibility of the “private language argument” of Wittgenstein as “a somewhat loose argument for a fundamentally implausible conclusion,” even though after 1962 these words are themselves qualified by the phrase “powerful arguments,” — but in later years those doubts are cast aside, until finally in 1982 the mature Kripke wholeheartedly embraces the “private language argument” as a philosophical argument of the old Wittgenstein, — his “perpetual dialectic.”

20/ The general distinction between the early and later Wittgenstein’s epistemology (as his “private language argument”) does not really influence Kripke that much during the decade between 1962 and 1972: “I came to have doubts.” Obviously, Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s epistemology and its influence upon his own mind, changed between 1962, 1972 and 1982: This distinguishes the young from the mature Kripke. We interpret Kripke’s words in 1982 to mean, in a roundabout way, that the theories of Naming and Necessity are influenced by the “force of a revelation,” i.e., the Kripkean distinction between the early and later versions of Wittgenstein’s epistemology (perpetual dialectic), the basis of Kripke’s “interpretation” of Wittgenstein’s private language argument, — itself in appearance, a radical and powerful argument, albeit in a “sense” seemingly implausible. The 1970 version of Naming and Necessity, as Saul Kripke’s own words intimate in 1982 and 1971 (Identity and Necessity), is saturated with Wittgenstein’s epistemological irrationalism, i.e., the subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism of his Transzendentale Logik, — which also infects the later version: The source of this deadly infection is the Kripkean necessity of identity as self–identification.

“[2] Wittgenstein has more than one way of arguing for a given conclusion, and even of presenting a single argument … This essay does not proceed by giving detailed exegesis of Wittgenstein’s text but rather develops the arguments in its own way… [3] It should be borne in mind that Philosophical Investigations is not a systematic philosophical work where conclusions, once definitely established, need not be reargued. Rather the Investigations is written as a perpetual dialectic, where persisting worries, expressed by the voice of the imaginary interlocutor, are never definitely silenced … [5] Although one has a strong sense that there is a problem, a rigorous statement of it is difficult. I am inclined to think that Wittgenstein’s later philosophical style, and the difficulty he found (see his Preface) in welding his thought into a conventional work presented with organized arguments and conclusions, is not simply a stylistic and literary preference, coupled with a penchant for a certain degree of obscurity, but stems in part from the [transcendental] nature of his [Kantian] subject. I suspect — for reasons that will become clearer later — that to attempt to present Wittgenstein’s argument precisely is to some extent to falsify it.”³

III. KRIPKEAN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY: IMAGINATION, INTUITION AND DESIGNATION

21/ In order to salvage the Copernican revolution as Liberal Internationalism, Saul Kripke cloaks his Anglo–American Neo–Kantianism, his version of cognitive power (imagination) as transcendental ratiocination (Transzendentale Logik), in the 1960s garb of “imagination,” which is his way of hiding Kant’s transcendentalism behind the verbiage of “possible worlds” (imaginary worlds, the realms of the Kripkean imaginary universe), which is the basis of his theory of designation:

“Let me make some distinctions that I want to use. The first is between a rigid and a nonrigid designator. What do these terms mean? As an example of a nonrigid designator, I can give an expression such as ‘the inventor of bifocals.’ Let us suppose that it was Benjamin Franklin who invented the bifocals, and so the expression, ‘the inventor of the bifocals,’ designates or refers to a certain man, namely, Benjamin Franklin. However we can easily imagine that the world could have been different, that under different circumstances someone else would have come upon this invention before Benjamin Franklin did, and in that case, he would have been the inventor of the bifocals. So, in this sense, the expression ‘the inventor of the bifocals’ is nonrigid: Under certain circumstances one man would have been the inventor of bifocals; under other circumstances, another man would have. In contrast, consider the expression ‘the square root of 25.’ Independently of the empirical facts, we can give an arithmetical proof that the square root [145] of 25 is in fact the number 5, and because we have proved this mathematically, what we have proved is necessary. If we think of numbers as entities at all, and let us suppose, at least for the purpose of this lecture, that we do, then the expression ‘the square root of 25’ necessarily designates a certain number, namely 5. Such an expression I call ‘a rigid designator’ … What do I mean by ‘rigid designator’? I mean a term that designates the same object in all possible worlds … [146] when I use the notion of rigid designator, I do not imply that the object referred to necessarily exists. All I mean is that in any possible world where the object in question does exist, in any situation where the object would exist, we use the designator in question to designate that object. In a situation where the object does not exist, then we should say that the designator has no referent and that the object in question so designated does not exist.”¹

22/ (a) Let us “suppose” (i.e., use our Kripkean “imagination and intuition”) that it was Benjamin Franklin who invented the bifocals: So the expression, “the inventor of the bifocals,” designates or refers to a certain man, namely, Benjamin Franklin? By merely supposing that it was Benjamin Franklin who invented the bifocals, the expression, “the inventor of the bifocals,” designates or refers to a certain man? The expression, “the inventor of the bifocals,” supposedly (imaginatively) designates or supposedly refers to a certain man, namely, Benjamin Franklin. The expression, “the inventor of the bifocals,” as a Kripkean “supposition” (imagining), does not actually designate or refer to any certain man: For we suppose (imagine), following in the Neo–Kantian footsteps of Saul Kripke, that it was Benjamin Franklin who invented the bifocals, but not really and truly a man named Benjamin Franklin.

23/ (b) We can easily imagine that the world could have been different, that under different circumstances someone else would have come upon this invention before Benjamin Franklin: But which world is this, that we “imagine” could have been different, since we suppose that it was “Benjamin Franklin” who invented the bifocals? The world that we imagine in this Kripkean thought experiment is an imaginary world, a phantasy. That we can easily imagine that the world could have been different, rather than we cannot easily imagine that the world could have been different, — this is another question, For what exactly is this Kripkean world, other than imaginary and delusional? What exactly does Saul Kripke mean by the power of our imagination? Imagination, in the Kripkean lexicon, is cognition, conceptualization, even self–consciousness? — i.e., self–identification as necessitation and identification.

24/ (c) “When I use the notion of rigid designator, I do not imply that the object referred to necessarily exists”: When Saul Kripke deploys (when Kripkean designation occurs) the term rigid designator, — as opposed to a nonrigid designator, i.e., that which supposedly designates imaginary things, which are of assistance (allegedly) in the production of our phantasms, — he uses a notion of designation. What a strange notion this is, the notion of the designation of phantasms. Surely, the objection will be raised, “in any possible world where the object in question does exist, in any situation where the object would exist, we use the designator in question to designate that object”? The rational distinction between possible and actual worlds, and therefore the precise distinction between possible and impossible worlds, in his discussion of identity and necessity, is nowhere evidenced, for the very reason that Saul Kripke does not advance any conception whatsoever of “the” world, whether empirical or non–empirical. Saul Kripke means by the “power” of his imagination to “designate” rigidly and nonrigidly, precisely what Kant means by his transcendental, — i.e., as deployed in his transcendental “inferences.” The alleged potency of Kripke’s vivid imagination (the “veracity” of his realm of possible worlds) is not forwarded by himself in the name of Kant’s transcendental ratiocination, but is rather advanced covertly as the “epistemological” power of his modal logic.

25/ According to Saul Kripke, there imaginatively exists a Kripkean epistemological distinction between possible (imaginable, phenomenal) and impossible (unimaginable, noumenal) worlds, i.e., worlds that are really and truly possible, and ones which are not possible, — such that Kripkean possible worlds are really and truly possible, as opposed to actual ones, epistemologically (imaginatively) speaking of course:

“All of this seems to me to be a totally misguided way of looking at things. What it amounts to is the view that counterfactual situations have to be described purely qualitatively. We cannot say, for example, ‘If Nixon had only given a sufficient bribe to Senator X, he would have gotten Carswell through’ because that refers to certain people, Nixon and Carswell, and talks about what things would be true of them in a counterfactual situation. We must say instead ‘If a man who has a hairline like such and such, and holds such an such political opinions had given a bribe to a man who was a senator and had such and such other qualities, then a man who was a judge in the South and had many other qualities resembling Carswell would have been confirmed.’ In other words, we must describe counterfactual situations purely qualitatively and then ask the question ‘Given that the situation contains people or things with such an such qualities, which of these people is (or is a counterpart of) Nixon, which is Carswell, and so on?’ This seems to me to be wrong. Who is to prevent us from saying [148] ‘Nixon might have gotten Carswell through had he done certain things’? We are speaking of Nixon and asking of what, in certain counterfactual situations, would have been true of him. We can say that if Nixon had done such and such, he would have lost the election to Humphrey. Those I am opposing would argue, ‘Yes, but how do you find out if the man you are talking about is in fact Nixon?’ It would indeed be very hard to find out, if you were looking at the whole situation through a telescope, but that is not what we are doing here. Possible worlds are not something to which an epistemological question like this applies. And if the phrase ‘possible worlds’ is what makes anyone think some such question applies, he should just drop this phrase and use some other expression, say ‘counterfactual situation,’ which might be less misleading. If we say ‘If Nixon had bribed such and such a Senator, Nixon would have gotten Carswell through,’ what is given in the very description of that situation is that it is a situation in which we are speaking of Nixon, and of Carswell, and of such and such a Senator. And there seems to be no less objection to stipulating that we are speaking of certain people than there can be objection to stipulating that we are speaking of certain qualities. Advocates of the other view take speaking of certain qualities as unobjectionable. They do not say, ‘How do we know that this quality (in another possible world) is that of redness?’ But they do find speaking of certain people objectionable.”²

26/ Saul Kripke’s epistemological distinction between actual (factual) and possible (counterfactual) worlds means that he distinguishes between epistemologically actual and epistemologically possible worlds: Saul Kripke’s epistemological universe is the transcendental world of Immanuel Kant, as the “power” of transcendental cognition (imagination). The alleged “transcendental power” inherent within Kripke’s version of imagination (“we can easily imagine”), as the power of imagination, underlying his distinction between factual and counterfactual worlds, is the delusion of modern subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism. “I can give …, let us suppose …, we can easily …, we have proved …, we think …, I mean …, we use …, we should say …,” — all these phrases culled from the above citations mean that Kripke is apparently doing something, i.e., something is allegedly accomplished, the success of which is effectuated in the name of “imagination,” — the basis of his distinction between “epistemologically” actual (factual) and possible (counterfactual) worlds. The first person singular and plural of Saul Kripke’s “modal” imagination is the subjectivity of transcendental egoity: The transcendental ego of Transzendentalphilosophie is the Archimedian reference point of Kripkean modal psychology, — the bastion of Kant’s Transzendentale Logik. Transzendentale Logik is the logic of transcendental egoity, the fountainhead of Kant’s Transzendentalphilosophie. We want an answer to the question: These “things” that Saul Kripke names as rigid and nonrigid designators, are they really and truly conceptions, rather than delusions, — is Kripkean designation conceptual (epistemological) rather than delusional (sophistical)? The epistemological worldhood of Kripke’s factual and counterfactual worlds is the transcendental ratiocination of Kant’s transcendentalism. Imagination, in the works of Saul Kripke, is Immanuel Kant’s “fairy rath of the mind,” i.e., modal logic is Transzendentale Logik.

27/ Saul Kripke’s modal logic is Kant’s Transzendentale Logik garbed in the verbiage of “possible worlds” as his epistemological (transcendental) theory of designation, but is infected with subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism all the same, — the modern unreason that plagues Kant’s transcendentalism: The symbological arrangements of Kripkean modal logic are likewise infected by the very modern European unreason that contaminates Kripke’s Neo–Kantianism. Saul Kripke’s apriori forms give us no insight into conceptual truth and reality: Designation is lost within the transcendental void between meaning and unmeaning, the sophistical chasm of modern unreason, wherein conceptual reality is unintelligible, and something unknowable exists, wherein phenomena and noumena collide. This imaginary universe of Saul Kripke is caught within the selfsame oblivion that engulfs European modernity, — as a vanishing phase of world history. The conceptualization of designation is lost within the transcendental void between meaning and unmeaning because the “fairy rath of the mind” merely phantasizes distinctions between actuality and inactuality, possibility and impossibility, in the sense of Kant’s transcendentalism: Designation is unconceptualization (reflective understanding). What exactly is Saul Kripke unconceiving? Kripkeanism unconceives and deconceptualizes the modern European notion of inference: As Quine moves beyond Russell, so Kripke moves beyond Wittgenstein.³ Kripke’s doctrine of the concept, the conceptual world, is imaginary; Kripkean imaginings and concepts are the very same things upon the universal historical stage of 20th century Americanism, namelyAmerican Cold War Kantian anti–Hegelian philosophical justifications of US Darwinian political and economic policies, as opposed to the epistemological and ontological justifications of the political economy of the Marxian (or Judeo Christian) traditions.

28/ Whether these imaginary (transcendental) creatures of designation are concepts as opposed to delusions, are meaningful as opposed to meaningless, Saul Kripke’s language, contaminated by his transcendental epistemology and psychology, is powerless to maintain: Kripkean designators are conceptual delusions and meaningless meanings, trapped within his imaginary realm (the epistemological worldhood of factual and counterfactual worlds), of whatever exactly might, could, would and should exist, together in stark contradistinction with whatever exists. The rigidity and non rigidity of designators collapse into the epistemological and philosophical void of designation, the transcendental vortex of Kripkean (20th century modern European) unreason: Actuality and possibility drown together in the bottomless ocean of Saul Kripke’s transcendental imagination. Powerless to be born again, Kripkeanism is forever caught between opposing worlds, one that is coming to be, while the other is passing away, — in the worldhood of the world, always a prisoner of the grave: The gallows of history beckon forth with their crooked guile, — the darkness of the executioner’s hood is the everlasting night of the Concept.

IV. CORRESPONDENCE THEORY AS IDENTITÄTSPHILOSOPHIE

29/ Saul Kripke’s Transzendentale Logik, garbed in the linguistic vestiges of modal logic, is a weapon against Correspondence or Identity Theory,* namely, Identitätsphilosophie (rationality is actuality and actuality is rationality) as Kantio–Hegelianism and Hegelian anti–Kantianism, which he designates as “materialism,” i.e., “the most popular identity theories advocated today … usually hold that a mental state is a brain state,”¹ in his discussion of the “mind–body problem”:

“[162] Second, the way we would think of picking them out — namely, the pain by its being an experience of a certain sort, and the brain state by its being the state of a certain material object, being of such and such molecular configuration — both of these pick out their objects essentially and not accidentally, that is, they pick them out by essential properties. Whenever the molecules are in this configuration, we do have such and such a brain state. Whenever you feel this, you do have a pain. So it seems that the identity theorist is in some trouble, for, since we have two rigid designators, the identity statement in question is necessary. Because they pick out their objects essentially, we cannot say the case where you seem to imagine the identity statement false is really an illusion like the illusion one gets in the case of heat and molecular motion, because that illusion depended on the fact that we pick out heat by a certain contingent property. So there is very little room to maneuver; perhaps none. The identity theorist, who holds that pain [163] is the brain state, also has to hold that it necessarily is the brain state. He therefore cannot concede, but has to deny, that there would have been situations under which one would have had pain but not the corresponding brain state. Now usually in arguments on the identity theory, this is very far from being denied. In fact, it is conceded from the outset by the materialist as well as by his opponent. He says, ‘of course, it could have been the case that we had pains without the brain states. It is a contingent identity.’ But that cannot be. He has to hold that we are under some illusion in thinking that we can imagine that there could have been pains without brain states. And the only model I can think of for what the illusion might be, or at least the model given by the analogy the materialists themselves suggest, namely, heat and molecular motion, simply does not work in this case. So the materialist is up against a very stiff challenge. He has to show that these things we think we can see to be possible are in fact not possible. He has to show that these things which we can imagine are not in fact things we can imagine. And that requires some very different philosophical argument from the sort which has been given in the case of heat and molecular motion. And it would have to be a deeper and subtler argument than I can fathom and subtler than has ever appeared in any materialistic literature that I have read. So the conclusion of this investigation would be that the analytical tools we are using go against the identity thesis and so go against the general thesis that mental states are just physical states. [164] The next topic would be my own solution to the mind–body problem, but that I do not have.”²

30/ Correspondence or Identity theorists are the mortal enemies of Saul Kripke’s sophistical philosophy of necessity and identity (self–identification), his imaginary theory of designation, — his “modal logic” based upon what he names as imagination and intuition, i.e., Transzendentale Logik: “Identity theorists cannot, contrary to their almost universal present practice, accept these intuitions; they must deny them, and explain them away. This is none too easy a thing to do.”³ Why is it none too easy a thing to do — to deny and explain away Kripke’s “intuitions,” his Kripkean phantasms? “We would have to suppose that we could have been in the same epistemological situation.”⁴ In other words, identity theorists must imagine that Kripkean “epistemology” is sophistry, — a fiendishly diabolical problem, if we mean by “intuition” exactly what Saul Kripke means by “imagination” (Transzendentale Logik: “the same epistemological situation”), i.e., the “ratiocination” which is the basis of his intuition of the transcendental necessity of identity as self–identification.

“The most popular identity theories advocated today explicitly fail to satisfy this simple requirement. For these theories usually hold that a mental state is a brain state, and that what makes the brain state into a mental state is its ‘causal role,’ the fact that it tends to produce certain behavior (as intentions produce actions, or pain, pain behavior) and to be produced by certain stimuli (e.g. pain, by pinpricks). If the relations between the brain state and its causes and effects are regarded as contingent, then being such–and–such–a–mental state is a contingent property of the brain state. Let X be a pain. The causal–role identity theorist holds (1) that X is a brain state, (2) that the fact that X is a pain is to be analyzed (roughly) as the fact that X is produced by certain stimuli and produces certain behavior. The fact mentioned in (2) is, of course, regarded [162] as contingent; the brain state X might well exist and not tend to produce the appropriate behavior in the absence of other conditions. Thus (1) and (2) assert that a certain pain X might have existed, yet not have been a pain. This seems to me self–evidently absurd. I imagine my pain: is it possible that it itself could have existed yet not have been a pain?”⁵

31/ I imagine my pain: is it possible that it itself could have existed yet not have been a pain? We will not respond to this question until Kripke tells us what exactly that which “could have existed” really and truly is, conceptually speaking, outside and beyond the epistemological (transcendental) meaning that he attributes to possible truth and reality (“I imagine … it possible”) as imagination and intuition. How many angels are on the head of a pin? is a question that first requires some rigorous theological elucidation, especially as regards to the philosophical difference between fallen and uplifted angels. Imaginary entities are not delusions? Concern over the transcendental status of what Saul Kripke names as imaginary pain (whether it could have, or could not have existed) we leave to modern sophistry and imaginative literature. Of course, that we refuse to answer Kripke’s psychedelic question does not mean that he wins the “argument,” — for rational argument is not a category of “transcendental psychology,” i.e., Kripkean imagination and intuition.

“If X = Y, then X and Y share all properties, including modal properties. If X is a pain and Y the corresponding brain state, then being a pain is an essential property of X, and being a brain state is an essential property of Y. If the correspondence relation is, in fact, identity, then it must be necessary of Y that it corresponds to a pain, and necessary of X that it correspond to a brain state, indeed to this particular brain state, Y. Both assertions seem false; it seems clearly possible that X should have existed without the corresponding brain state; or that the brain state should have existed without being felt as pain. Identity theorists cannot, contrary to their almost universal present practice, accept these intuitions; they must deny them, and explain them away. This is none too easy a thing to do.”⁶

32/ When Saul Kripke maintains that “X and Y share all properties, including modal properties,” he means, as is everywhere evidenced in his writing, that X and Y share all imaginary properties, including modal properties, i.e., modal properties are imaginary. That his version of modality is rational, that modal properties are not delusions and phantasms, Kripke nowhere establishes. “It seems clearly possible that X should have existed without the corresponding brain state; or that the brain state should have existed without being felt as pain.” Indeed, it seems clearly possible, but once we recollect that everything which seems, within the Kripkean realm of clarity and possibility, is seemingly imaginary, we cannot escape from the contradiction that whatever seems clearly possible, also equally seems clearly impossible.

V. KRIPKEAN EPISTEMIC SITUATIONS: TRANSCENDENTAL EPISTEMOLOGY

33/ Saul Kripke: “Quine and Marcus, according to the present standpoint, err in identifying the epistemological and the metaphysical issues.”¹ What exactly does Kripke mean by the phrase “present standpoint”? Kripke means by his “present standpoint,” his sophistical distinction between actual and possible worlds, based upon his version of Kant’s sophistical “psychology” of transcendental egoity: Saul Kripke affirms that the epistemological power of Kripkean designation is not imaginary, when he imagines that names are rigid designators, and in every possible world, a and b will refer to this same object x, and to no other:

“[154] If names are rigid designators, then there can be no question about identities being necessary, because ‘a’ and ‘b’ will be rigid designators of a certain man or thing x. Then even in every possible world, a and b will refer to this same object x, and to no other, and so there will be no situation in which a might not have been b. That would have to be a situation in which the object which we are also now calling ‘x’ would not have been identical with itself. Then one could not possibly have a situation in which Cicero would not have been Tully or Hesperus would not have been Phosphorus. Aside from the identification of necessity with a priority, what has made people feel the other way? There are two things which have made people feel the other way. Some people tend to regard identity statements as metalinguistic statements, to identify the statement ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ with the metalinguistic statement ‘‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are names of the same heavenly body.’ And that, of course, might have been false. We might have used the terms ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ as names of two different heavenly bodies. But, of course, this has nothing to do with the necessity of identity. In the same sense ‘2 + 2= 4’ might have been false. The phrases [155] ‘2 + 2’ and ‘4’ might have been used to refer to two different numbers. One can imagine a language, for example, in which ‘+,’ ‘2,’ and ‘=’ were used in the standard way, but ‘4’ was used as the name of, say, the square root of minus 1, as we should call it, ‘i.’ Then ‘2 + 2 = 4’ would be false, for 2 plus 2 is not equal to the square root of minus 1. But this is not what we want. We do not want just to say that a certain statement which we in fact use to express something true could have expressed something false. We want to use the statement in our way and see if it could have been false. Let us do this. What is the idea people have? They say, ‘Look, Hesperus might not have been Phosphorus. Here a certain planet was seen in the morning, and it was seen in the evening; and it just turned out later on as a matter of empirical fact that they were one and the same planet. If things had turned out otherwise, they would have been two different planets, or two different heavenly bodies, so how can you say that such a statement is necessary?’”²

34/ According to Saul Kripke, his adversaries the identity theorists (“materialists”), — those who resist his transcendental sophistry, — they reject his imaginings based upon feeling, but not reason: What has made people feel the other way? According to Kripke, his sophistry is rejected by identity theorists because of their feeling of confusion between epistemology and metaphysics, i.e., their feeling of confusion with regards to a prioricity and necessity:

“The two confusions alleged, especially the second, are both related to the confusion of the metaphysical question of the necessity of ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ with the epistemological question of its a prioricity. For if Hesperus is identified by its position in the sky in the evening, and Phosphorus by its position in the morning, an investigator may well know, in advance of empirical research, that Hesperus is Phosphorus if and only if one and the same body occupies position x in the evening and position y in the morning. The a priori material equivalence of the two statements, however, does not imply their strict (necessary) equivalence. (The same remarks apply to the case of heat and molecular motion below.) Similar remarks apply to some extent to the relationship between ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ and ‘‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ name the same thing.’ A confusion that also operates is, of course, the confusion between what we would say of a counterfactual situation and how people in that situation would have described it; this confusion, too, is probably related to the confusion between a prioricity and necessity.”³

35/ Kripke’s sophistry is rejected by his adversaries (identity theorists) because of their feeling of confusion between epistemology and metaphysics, i.e., their feeling of confusion with regards to a prioricity and necessity: “Some people tend to regard identity statements as metalinguistic statements … of course, this has nothing to do with the necessity of identity.” Pray tell, monsieur, why your adversaries’ notions have nothing to do with the “necessity of identity.” “One can imagine a language … in which ‘+,’ ‘2,’ and ‘=’ were used in the standard way, but ‘4’ was used as the name of, say, the square root of minus 1, as we should call it, ‘i.’” The Kripkean power of our imagination, alleges Saul Kripke, enables us to imagine an imaginary language. From our Kripkean imaginings of an imaginary language, it follows according to Saul Kripke’s “logic” that “identity statements as metalinguistic statements … [have] nothing to do with the necessity of identity,” and that therefore, imaginatively speaking, names are Kripkean rigid designators. Saul Kripke forgets (or conveniently ignores) that imaginings are imaginary, and not conceptual, precisely because he draws no rational distinction between reason and unreason: Imaginary arguments, whether in the guise of modal or non modal logic, are not rational inferences: “Cognition, instead of taking from this stage the final step into the heights, has fled from the unsatisfactoriness of the categories of the understanding to sensuous existence, imagining that in this it possesses what is solid and self–consistent” — Hegel.

36/ Saul Kripke phantasizes that his imaginings of identity and necessity are not delusions, i.e., that Kripkean imagination is conceptualization, rather than make–believe: Designation, according to Kripke’s transcendental phantasy, is conceptualization, — Kripkean designators are not round squares. The Kripkean identification of imagination and intuition with conceptualization, collapses into the dustbin of unreason, under the weight of his “epistemological psychology” of self–identification, following in the Kantian footsteps of transcendental egoity as the bastion of Kant’s Transzendentale Logik.

VI/ Hegel and Kant: Identitätsphilosophie Versus Reflexionphilosophie

37/ We have imagined many things over the years, alas, we do not possess the miraculous power of Saul Kripke’s vivid imagination: We are quite unable, intellectually speaking, to categorize our imaginings as logical, whether modal or non–modal, for imaginings are merely imaginary creatures of the imagination. Perhaps our imagination is flawed, even defective? The amazing power of Saul Kripke’s imagination is the epistemological potency behind the worldhood of his factual and counterfactual worlds, — his imaginative power which distinguishes between the realms of actuality and possibility, necessity and contingency. Surging from out of the Kripkean epistemological imagination, arise the epistemic dimensions of actuality and possibility, factuality and counterfactuality, as well as necessity and contingency required for his imaginary epistemological distinction between rigid and nonrigid designation: The imaginative power of Kripkean epistemology is the selfsame miraculous potency of designation. Miraculous because Kripke never draws any conceptual distinction whatsoever between epistemology and ontology (as methodology and doctrine), i.e., the conception of the precise difference between the epistemological and non–epistemological worlds is never conceived conceptually, but rather is unconceptual: For any such Kripkean distinction leads directly into the swamp of Transzendentale Logik. The power that allegedly animates Saul Kripke’s “imagination” is cognitive, i.e., designative, rather than the delusional ability deployed by phantasms in their seduction of our weak and ineffectual minds?

“Aber der reflectirende Verstand bemächtigte sich der Philosophie. Es ist genau zu wissen, was dieser Ausdruck sagen will, der sonst vielfach als Schlagwort gebraucht wird; es ist überhaupt darunter der abstrahirende und damit trennende Verstand zu verstehen, der in seinen Trennungen beharrt. Gegen die Vernunft gekehrte, beträgt er sich als gemeiner Menschenverstand und machte seine Ansicht geltend, daß die Wahrheit auf sinnlicher Realität beruhe, daß die Gedanken nur Gedanken seyen, in dem Sinne, daß erste die sinnliche Wahrnehmung ihnen Gehalt und Realität gebe, daß die Vernunft, insofern sie an und für sich bleibe, nur Hirngespinste erzeuge. In diesem Verzichtthun der Vernunft auf sich selbst geht der Begriff der Wahrheit verloren; sie ist darauf eingeschränkt, nur subjektive Wahrheit, nur die Erscheinung zu erkennen, nur etwas, dem die Natur der Sache selbst nicht entspreche; das Wissen ist zur Meynung zurückgefallen. Diese Wendung jedoch, welch das Erkennen nimmt, und die als Verlust und Rückschritt erscheint, hat das Liefere zum Grunde, worauf überhaupt die Erhebung der Vernunft in den höheren Geist der neueren Philosophie beruht. [6] Der Grund jener allgemein gewordenen vorstellung ist nemlich in der Einsicht von dem nothwendigen Widerstreite der Bestimmungen des Verstands mit sich selbst zu suchen. — Die schon namhaft gemachte Reflexion ist diß, über das concrete Unmittelbare hinaus zu gehen, und dasselbe zu Bestimmen und zu trennen. Aber sie muß eben so sehr über diese ihrer trennenden Bestimmungen hinausgehen, und sie zunächst beziehen. Auf dem Standpunkte dieses Beziehens tritt der Widerstreit derselben hervor. Dieses Beziehen der Reflexion gehört an sich der vernunft an; die Erhebung über jene Bestimmungen, die zur Einsicht ihres Widerstreits derselben gelangt, ist der große negative Schritt zum wahrhaften Begriffe der Vernunft. Aber die nicht durchgeführte Einsicht fällt in den Mißverstand, als ob die Vernunft es sey, welche in Widerspruch mit sich gerathe; sie erkennt nichte, daß der Widerspruch eben das Erheben der Vernunft über die Beschränkungen des Verstands und das Auflösen derselben ist. Statt von hier aus den letzten Schritt in die höhe zu thun, ist die Erkenntniß von dem Unbefriedigenden der Verstandes bestimmungen zu der sinnlichen Wirklichkeit zurükgeflohen, an derselben das Feste und Einige zu haben vermeinend. Indem aber auf der andern Seite diese Erkenntniß sich als die Erkenntniß nur von Erscheinendem weiß, wird das Unbefriedigende derselben eingestanden, aber zugleich vorausgesetzt, als obs zwar nicht die Dinge an sich, aber doch innerhalb der Sphäre der Erscheinung richtig erkannt würde, als ob dabei gleichsam nur die Art der Gegenstände verschieden wäre, und die eine Art, nemlich die Dinge an sich zwar nicht, aber doch die andere Art, nemlich die Erscheinungen in die Erkenntniß fielen. Wie wenn einem Manne richtige Einsicht beygemessen würde, [7] mit dem Zusatz, daß er jedoch nichts Wahres, sondern nur Unwahres einzusehen fähig sey. So ungereimt das letztere wäre, so ungereimt ist eine wahre Erkenntniß, die den Gegenstand nicht erkännte, wie er an sich ist.”¹

38/ As the general notion of logic, cognition transcends the concrete immediate object and determines and separates it, and equally transcends its separating determinations and straightway connects them. At the stage of this connecting of the determinations conflict emerges. This connecting activity of reflection belongs in itself to reason, while the rising above those determinations is the insight into their conflict, which is the great negative step towards the true Notion of reason. The insight when not thorough–going commits the mistake of thinking that it is reason which is in contradiction with itself; it does not recognize that the contradiction is precisely the rising of reason above the limitations of the understanding and the resolving of them. Reason, in the speculative logical and dialectical system of the genuine Hegel’s philosophical science of absolute idealism, rises above the limitations of the understanding and resolves them as the true Notion, within the general conception of logic. Shall we therefore hold that the realm of philosophy and world history is beyond the self–determination of reason and the general conception of logic in the speculative logical and dialectical system of the genuine Hegel’s philosophical science of absolute idealism? We most certainly shall not espouse the Transzendentale Logik of Kantian anti–Hegelianism and Kantio–Hegelianism (“the mistake of thinking that it is reason which is in contradiction with itself,” as the irreconcilable chasm between epistemology and metaphysics, i.e., Critique versus dogmatism), but rather embrace the superpower of conceptualization:

“[278] Aus diesem Verluste seiner selbst und seiner Welt und dem unendlichen Schmerz desselben, als dessen Volk das israelitische bereit gehalten war, erfaßt der in sich zurückgedrängte Geist in dem Extreme seiner absoluten Negativität, dem an und für sich seienden Wendepunkt, die unendliche Positivität dieses seines Innern, das Prinzip der Einheit der göttlichen und menschlichen Natur, die Versöhnung als der innerhalb des Selbstbewußtseins und der Subjektivität erschienenen objektiven Wahrheit und Freiheit, welche dem nordischen Prinzip der germanischen Völker zu vollführen übertragen wird … Indem — in dem harten Kampfe dieser im Unterschiede, der hier seine absolute Entgegensetzung gewonnen, stehenden [279] und zugleich in einer Einheit und Idee wurzelnden Reiche, — das Geistliche die Existenz seines Himmels zum irdischen Diesseits und zur gemeinen Weltlichkeit, in der Wirklichkeit und in der Vorstellung, degradiert, das Weltliche dagegen sein abstraktes Fürsichsein zum Gedanken und dem Prinzipe vernünftigen Seins und Wissens, zur Vernünftigkeit des Rechts und Gesetzes hinaufbildet, ist an sich der Gegensatz zur marklosen Gestalt geschwunden; die Gegenwart hat ihre Barbarei und unrechtliche Willkür, und die Wahrheit hat ihr Jenseits und ihre zufällige Gewalt abgestreift, so daß die wahrhafte Versöhnung objektiv geworden, welche den Staat zum Bilde und zur Wirklichkeit der Vernunft entfaltet, worin das Selbstbewußtsein die Wirklichkeit seines substantiellen Wissens und Wollens in organischer Entwickelung, wie in der Religion das Gefühl und die Vorstellung dieser seiner Wahrheit als idealer Wesenheit, in der Wissenschaft aber die freie begriffene Erkenntnis dieser Wahrheit als einer und derselben in ihren sich ergänzenden Manifestationen, dem Staate, der Natur und der ideellen Welt, findet.”²

39/ Hegel divides philosophy from sophistry as the genuine Hegelian distinction between Identitätsphilosophie and Reflexionphilosophie, — and he is not alone in the endeavour, for even his earliest adversaries (Kantian traditions, i.e., impure Hegelianism as pseudo–Hegelianism and anti–Hegelianism) admit as much:

“Zwei Behandlungsweisen der Logik sind es, welche sich gegenseitig am schroffesten und durchgreifendsten gegenüber stehen, die formale und die Hegel’sche. Wenn die erstere sich auf ein mehr als zweitausendjähriges historisches Recht beruft und wegen der stets sich gleich bleibenden Denk–Gesetze auch für die Zukunft eine Dauer beansprucht, welche der des Menschengeschlechtes gleich komme, so behauptet andererseits die letztere, erst jetzt durch die Entwicklung des absoluten Begriffes das Denken und dessen Inhalt erkannt zu haben, und sie umgibt sich auch ihrerseits mit dem Scheine, als sei die Philosophie jetzt „fertig“ und „Nichts mehr zu thun übrig.“ Indem nun eine Versöhnung dieser beiden Richtungen nach ihren Principien unmöglich war, aber doch Manche Grund genug fanden, sich weder der einen noch der anderen anzuschliessen, so entstand in den letzten Jahren ( — von dem ,,jetzigen‘‘ Standpunkte der Philosophie wollen wir ja nur sprechen — ) eine hinreichend grosse Anzahl von Darstellungen der Logik oder Untersuchungen über Princip und Entwicklung des menschlichen Denkens. Will man dieselben im Allgemeinen in Classen unterzubringen versuchen, so möchten etwa folgende Unterschiede sich ergeben: Die Einen fallen, gleichsam aus Schrecken vor Hegel’s Resultat, in frühere, selbst vorkantische, Stufen der Philosophie zurück und entbehren für die jetzige Entwicklung eines festen Principes; ihnen zunächst stehen Jene, welche in ängstlicher Besorgniss sich zur Gefühls–Philosophie und Jacobischen Anschauungen flüchten; Andere aber suchen der Hegel’schen Logik dadurch eine begründete Opposition entgegenzustellen, [4] dass sie die Wissenschaft der Logik auf dem Boden anderer Systeme, welche jedoch ebenfalls der dialectischen Philosophie angehören, aufbauen (sie stützen sich nemlich auf Herbart, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Krause, bestreben sich aber fast Alle, von solcher Basis aus der formalen Logik aufzuhelfen); wieder Andere wollen den am meisten hervorgehobenen Principfehler Hegel’s verbessern oder die Dialectik „positiv“ machen, womit (aus unten zu entwickelnden Gründen) vielfach eine Rückkehr zum zweiten Stadium Fichte’s verwandt ist; Einige wenige endlich versuchen völlig neue Wege zu bahnen. Diese sämmtlichen Richtungen sind nun einer nähern Betrachtung zu unterwerfen, wobei jedoch eine ausführliche Darstellung der einzelnen Lehren nicht beabsichtigt sein kann (die Philosophie von heute und gestern ist ja eben noch nicht geschichtlich geworden), sondern nur eine kurze Kritik die principielle Fassung der Logik angeben soll, — allerdings unverhohlen mit der Tendenz, einer sprachlichen Logik die Bahn zu öffnen, denn eine solche halte ich für die künftig nothwendige.”³

40/ Zwei Behandlungsweisen der Logik sind es, welche sich gegenseitig am schroffesten und durchgreifendsten gegenüber stehen, die formale und die Hegel’sche: Upon the stage of modern European political and economic world history, Identitätsphilosophie and Reflexionphilosophie collide. Since around the 1950s many of our ideologues in the guise of public academics have learned that Kant is the great modern sophister of the master race, they have only whispered his name in their masterworks, but they nevertheless follow the Transzendentale road of the Copernican Revolution as Liberal Internationalism, for they are puppets of inferior ruling classes in the world of today. Kantians hold that Kant is a great philosopher, while anti–Kantians hold that Kant is a Sophist. Those academics who maintain that Kant is a great philosopher, and that they disagree with his philosophy (and that therefore they are anti–Kantians), really mean that they disagree with a certain interpretation of some element of Kantianism (but they do not reject Kantianism in general as sophistry): Precise examination of their “philosophies” proves that they themselves are actually Kantians in disguise, pushing Kantianism, or some version thereof, under some other name, i.e., existentialism, phenomenology, empiricism, and so forth, wherein are covertly imported transcendental arguments and distinctions under new names, — a tactic calculated to avoid serious criticism of their doctrines, which allows them to pass themselves off as intellectual innovators, especially in the arena of politics and economics. They are thereby saved from explaining how Kantianism is not raciology, saved from explaining the role of Kantianism in the Holocaust, and saved from explaining the difference between reason and unreason in twentieth century modern European history, especially the history of Genocide and nationalism.

41/ We shall rephrase our point one last time, lest our words be abused, — in the name of modern subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism: The Kripkean version of imagination flounders upon the Copernican revolution of Liberal Internationalism, — the transcendental distinction between epistemology and metaphysics, especially as found in Kant’s division between Critique and dogmatism, i.e., as enshrined in the Kantian separation and connexion of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, and deployed as the transcendental methodology of Transzendentale Logik, — the transcendent structure of transcendental egoity: “Cognition … has fled from the unsatisfactoriness of the categories of the understanding to sensuous existence, imagining that in this it possesses what is solid and self–consistent.” The bicephalous monstrosity of European modernity raises its bloodstained maws, and none shall escape world history and its razor sharp claws.

VII. KRIPKEAN TRANSZENDENTALPHILOSOPHIE

42/ In order to combine necessitation and identification (naming and necessity) as the self–identification of Lord Russell’s modern European conception of freedom (Bonapartism and Machiavellianism, i.e., autocracy founded upon popular consent, the power of the people and tyranny of the masses, viz., modern European Egoity), outdated and surpassed in the world of today by American Liberty unchained by the Digital Revolution, Saul Kripke distinguishes between epistemology and nonpejorative metaphysics, in order to distinguish between necessity and a prioricity, i.e., yet always with regards to Kripkean categories of truth which allegedly exist (imaginatively speaking):

“[260] Before I go any further into this problem, I want to talk about another distinction which will be important in the methodology of these talks. Philosophers have talked (and, of course, there has been considerable controversy in recent years over the meaningfulness of these notions) [about] various categories of truth, which are called ‘a priori,’ ‘analytic,’ ‘necessary’ — and sometimes even ‘certain’ is thrown into this batch. The terms are often used as if whether there are things answering to these concepts is an interesting question, but we might as well regard them all as meaning the same thing. Now, everyone remembers Kant (a bit) as making a distinction between ‘a priori’ and ‘analytic.’ So maybe this distinction is still made. In contemporary discussion very few people, if any, distinguish between the concepts of statements being a priori and their being necessary. At any rate I shall not use the terms ‘a priori’ and ‘necessary’ interchangeably here. Consider what the traditional characterizations of such terms as ‘a priori’ and ‘necessary’ are. First the notion of a prioricity is a concept of epistemology. I guess the traditional characterization from Kant goes something like: a priori truths are those which can be known independently of any experience. This introduces another problem before we get off the ground, because there’s another modality in the characterization of ‘a priori,’ namely, it is supposed to be something which can be known independently of any experience. That means that in some sense it’s possible (whether we do or do not in fact know it independently of any experience) to know this independently of any experience. And possible for whom? For God? For the Martians? Or just for people with minds like ours? To make this all clear might [involve] a host of problems all of its own about what sort of possibility is in question here. It might be best therefore, instead of using the phrase ‘a priori truth,’ to the extent that one uses it at all, to stick to the question of whether a particular person or knower knows something a priori or believes it true on the basis of a priori evidence. I won’t go further too much into the problems that might arise with the notion of a prioricity here. I will say that some philosophers somehow change the modality in this characterization from can to must. [261] They think that if something belongs to the realm of a priori knowledge, it couldn’t possibly be known empirically. This is just a mistake. Something may belong in the realm of such statements that can be known a priori but still may be known by particular people on the basis of experience. To give a really common sense example: anyone who has worked with a computing machine knows that the computing machine may give an answer to whether such and such a number is prime. No one has calculated or proved that the number is prime; but the machine has given the answer: this number is prime. We, then, if we believe that the number is prime, believe it on the basis of our knowledge of the laws of physics, the construction of the machine, and so on. We therefore do not believe this on the basis of purely a priori evidence. We believe it (if anything is a posteriori at all) on the basis of a posteriori evidence. Nevertheless, maybe this could be known a priori by someone who made the requisite calculations. So ‘can be known a priori’ doesn’t mean ‘must be known a priori.’ The second concept which is in question is that of necessity. Sometimes this is used in an epistemological way and might then just mean a priori. And of course, sometimes it is used in a physical way when people distinguish between physical and logical necessity. But what I am concerned with here is a notion which is not a notion of epistemology but of metaphysics, in some (I hope) nonpejorative sense. We ask whether something might have been true, or might have been false. Well, if something is false, it’s obviously not necessarily true. If it is true, might it have been otherwise? Is it possible that, in this respect, the world should have been different from the way it is? If the answer is ‘no,’ then this fact about the world is a necessary one. If the answer is ‘yes,’ then this fact about the world is a contingent one. This in and of itself has nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything. It’s certainly a philosophical thesis, and not a matter of obvious definitional equivalence, either that everything a priori is necessary or that everything necessary is a priori. Both concepts may be vague. That may be another problem. But at any rate they are dealing with two different domains, two different areas, the epistemological and the metaphysical … [263] The terms ‘necessary’ and ‘a priori,’ then, as applied to statements are not obvious synonyms. There may be a philosophical argument connecting them, perhaps even identifying them; but an argument is required, not simply the observation that the two terms are clearly interchangeable. (I will argue below that in fact they are not even coextensive — that necessary a posteriori truths, and probably contingent a priori truths, both exist.)”¹

43/ Either everything a priori is necessary or everything necessary is a priori? “This” (notion of metaphysics: Everything necessary is a priori) in and of itself has nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything? Here we see Saul Kripke’s affiliation with Bertrand Russell’s Metaphysical Unknowable (foisted upon the Weltgeist of rational Hegelianism, elucidated via the modern European pseudo–Hegelian and anti–Hegelian goggles of Kantian anti–Hegelianism and Kantio–Hegelianism): “We shall not deny that there may be a metaphysical ego. We shall merely say that it is a question that does not concern us in any way, because it is a matter about which we know nothing and can know nothing, and therefore it obviously cannot be a thing that comes into science in any way.”² This “in and of itself” (which has nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything) of early Kripkeanism is not the Unknowable of Immanuel Kant, inherited via Russellian Anglo–Saxon sophistry (“It is a matter about which we know nothing and can know nothing”), itself inherited from the Kantian tradition of nineteenth century German Socialism (“We might live to see another French Revolution”), as the imaginary universe of Transzendentale Logik, the intuitive bastion of Transcendental Egoity? This question is not at all rhetorical. Bertrand Russell deploys his Neo–Kantianism to bash his version of Hegel’s “Metaphysical Ego,” seemingly oblivious to Kant’s Unknowable which is the very basis of his transcendental attack: Russell attacks therefore only the Neo–Kantian phantasm of impure Hegelianism. Saul Kripke deploys the same Russellian Neo–Kantian categories in his transcendental distinction between epistemology and metaphysics as a “philosophical thesis.” Kripke only “hopes” to avoid the same sophistical dead–end as Russellianism: “What I am concerned with here is a notion which is not a notion of epistemology but of metaphysics, in some (I hope) nonpejorative sense.” Neo–Kantian attacks against Hegel in 1970, in light of Kantian raciology exposed in the 1950s by Earl Count, are not so easy to uphold in the American world, but Saul Kripke is inexorably sucked into the transcendental void of Kantian anti–Hegelianism and Kantio–Hegelianism all the same. On the stage of world history, Saul Kripke’s “logic” of Naming and Necessity, the “new theory of reference,” is Transzendentale Logik in the Kantian tradition of modern European unreason.

44/ Saul Kripke divides epistemology from nonpejorative metaphysics in the name of Transzendentalphilosophie, and thereby effects his Kripkean separation of necessity from a prioricity, because he holds that “necessary a posteriori truths, and probably contingent a priori truths, both exist.” How does Kripke accomplish this imaginary feat? Saul Kripke holds fast to his methodological doctrine that either everything a priori is necessary or everything necessary is a priori: This means, according to Kripke, that the conceptions of a priority and necessity deal with “two different domains, two different areas, the epistemological and the metaphysical.” How does Kripke know that what he classifies as a prioricity and necessity deal with two different areas, the realms of Kripkean epistemology and metaphysics? The Kripkean imaginary conceptions of necessity and a prioricity deal with the realms of Kripkean epistemology and nonpejorative metaphysics, because everything a priori is necessary or everything necessary is a priori. That everything a priori is necessary or everything necessary is a priori, — this is Saul Kripke’s methodological doctrine, and his self–evident truth: The certainty of Kripke’s self–evident truth comes from Kripkean “philosophy” (“What I am concerned with here is a notion which is not a notion of epistemology but of metaphysics, in some (I hope) nonpejorative sense … they are dealing with two different domains, two different areas, the epistemological and the metaphysical”): “It’s certainly a philosophical thesis, and not a matter of obvious definitional equivalence.” How does Saul Kripke know that his methodological doctrine is certainly a philosophical thesis (i.e., that his “conception” of philosophy is rational rather than sophistical?) otherwise philosophical nonsense, i.e., sophistry? According to Saul Kripke, it’s just the way “the world” is, viz., “this in and of itself has nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything.” In his own words, the fact that Kripke’s methodological doctrine is certainly philosophical — a “philosophical thesis,”— and therefore Kripkean philosophy is rational, rather than philosophical nonsense (unreason), is in and of itself Unknowable, — in and of itself, it has nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything. Saul Kripke’s concerns and hopes are unintelligible. The metaphysical ground of Kripkean Egoity is Unknowable (Transzendentale), which means the Kripkean Cogito is likewise inscrutable, — the sphere of Kripkean imagination and intuition is therefore itself unintelligible. According to Saul Kripke’s Transzendentalphilosophie, the universe of truth and reality, the rationality of the world, the rational ground of metaphysics and epistemology, is ultimately unintelligible and unknowable, — “in and of itself has nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything.” Why exactly does Saul Kripke’s version of the rational world, in and of itself, have nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything? Evidently Professor Kripke, upon the stage of twentieth century world history, is greatly enamored with Immanuel Kant’s Transzendentalphilosophie, i.e., Transcendental ratiocination as the bastion of Transzendentale Logik, is the purview of Transcendental Egoity, — modern European unreason.

45/ The amazing intuitive power of Saul Kripke’s “logical” imagination is the transcendental potency behind the worldhood of his factual and counterfactual worlds, — his imaginative power which intuitively distinguishes, both methodologically and doctrinally (as form and content), between the realms of actuality and possibility, necessity and contingency, a posteriority and a priority, as well as distinguishing between epistemology and metaphysics (paraded around in the academic garb of logic and mathematics), is ultimately Unknowable: The worldhood of Saul Kripke’s rational world is imaginary and intuitive, i.e., unintelligible. Transcendental imagination and intuition as the Transzendentalphilosophie of Saul Kripke, is the Kantian void of Transcendental Egoity.

VIII. KRIPKE AND RUSSELL

46/ Saul Kripke rehabilitates the Transzendentale Logik (transcendental arguments) of Bertrand Russell in order to align Russell’s analytico–logico–linguistic transcendentalism with the alignments of the Cold War (Kripke wages warfare against “materialists,” i.e., Correspondence or Identity Theorists (Kantio –Hegelians):

“In Russell’s theory, F(ιxGx) follows from (x)Fx and (∃!x)Gx, provided that the description in F(ιxGx) has the entire context for its scope (in Russell’s 1905 terminology, has a ‘primary occurrence’). Only then is F(ιxGx) ‘about’ the denotation of ‘ιxGx.’ Applying this rule to (14) [read: (4) i.e., “(x)(y) ((x = y) ⊃ ☐ (x = y)),” Kripke, 1971, 136], we get the results indicated in the text. Notice that, in the ambiguous form ☐(ιxGx = ιxHx), if one or both of the descriptions have ‘primary occurrences’ the formula does not assert the necessity of ιxGx = ιxHx; if both have secondary occurrences, it does. Thus in a language without specific scope indicators, descriptions must be construed with the smallest possible scope — only then will ~A be the negation of A, ☐A the necessitation of A, and the like … So as to avoid misunderstanding, let me emphasize that I am of course not asserting that Russell’s notion of scope solves Quine’s problem of ‘essentialism’; what it does show, especially in conjunction with modern model–theoretic approaches to modal logic, is that quantified modal logic need not deny the truth of all instances of (x) (y) (x = y · ⊃ · Fx ⊃ Fy), nor of all instances of ‘(x) (Gx ⊃ Ga)’ (where ‘a’ is to be replaced by a nonvacuous definite description whose scope is all of ‘Ga’), in order to avoid [140] making it a necessary truth that one and the same man invented bifocals and headed the original Postal Department. Russell’s contextual definition of descriptions need not be adopted in order to ensure these results; but other logical theories, Fregean or other, which take descriptions as primitive must somehow express the same logical facts. Frege showed that a simple, non–iterated context containing a definite description with small scope, which cannot be interpreted as ‘being’ about the denotation of the description, can be interpreted as about its ‘sense.’ Some logicians have been interested in the question of the conditions under which, in an intensional context, a description with small scope is equivalent to the same one with large scope. One of the virtues of a Russellian treatment of descriptions in modal logic is that the answer (roughly that the description be a ‘rigid designator’ in the sense of this lecture) then follows from the other postulates for quantified modal logic; no special postulates are needed, as in Hintikka’s treatment. Even if descriptions are taken as primitive, special postulation of when scope is irrelevant can often be deduced from more basic axioms.”¹

47/ In a language without specific scope indicators, descriptions must be construed with the smallest possible scope? Frege showed that a simple, non–iterated context containing a definite description with small scope, which cannot be interpreted as “being” about the denotation of the description, can be interpreted as about its “sense”? Even if descriptions are taken as primitive, special postulation of when scope is irrelevant can often be deduced from more basic axioms?

“‘Can be known a priori’ doesn’t mean ‘must be known a priori’ … It’s certainly a philosophical thesis, and not a matter of obvious definitional equivalence, either that everything a priori is necessary or that everything necessary is a priori. Both concepts may be vague. That may be another problem. But at any rate they are dealing with two different domains, two different areas, the epistemological and the metaphysical.”²

48/ Saul Kripke’s rehabilitation of Bertrand Russell’s Transzendentale Logik via his own methodological doctrine (sic) of reference, the Kripkean Cold War distinction between can and must, flounders upon the imaginary distinction between epistemology and nonpejorative metaphysics (a prioricity versus necessity): Transcendental ratiocination (Kripkean intuitions) as the bastion of Transzendentale Logik, is the purview of Transcendental Egoity, — modern European unreason (the mistake of thinking that it is reason which is in contradiction with itself).

“Ich erinnere, daß ich auf die Kantische Philosophie in diesem Werke darum häufig Rücksicht nehme, (was manchen überflüssig scheinen könnte) weil sie, — ihre nähere Bestimmtheit sowie die Besonderen Theile der Ausführung mögen sonst und auch in diesem Werke betrachtet werden, wie sie wollen, — die Grundlage [30] und den Ausgangspunkt der neueren Philosophie ausmachte, und diß ihr Verdienst durch das, was an ihr ausgesetzt werden möge, ihr ungeschmälert bleibt. Auch darum ist auf sie in der objectiven Logik wenigstens häufig Rücksicht zu nehmen, weil sie sich auf wichtig bestimmtere Seiten des Logischen naher einläßt, spätere Darstellungen der Philosophie hingegen dasselbe wenig beachtet, zum Theil oft nur eine rohe, — aber nicht ungerechte — , Verachtung dagegen bewiesen haben. Das bei uns am weitesten verbreitete Philosophiren tritt nicht aus den kantischen Resultaten, daß die Vernunft seinen wahren Gehalt erkennen könne, und in Ansehung der absoluten Wahrheit auf das Glauben zu verweisen sey, heraus. Was aber bey Kant Resultat ist, damit wird in diesem Philosophiren unmittelbar angefangen, damit die vorhergehende Ausführung, aus welcher jenes Resultat herkömmt, und welches philosophisches Erkennen ist, vorweggeschnitten. Die Kantische Philosophie dient so als ein Polster für die Trägheit des Denkens, die sich damit beruhigt, daß bereits alles bewiesen und abgethan sey. Für Erkenntniß und einen bestimmten Inhalt des Denkens, der in solcher unfruchtbaren und trocknen Beruhigung sich nicht findet, ist sich daher an jene vorangegangene Ausführung zu wenden.”³

I flatter myself as the first Hegelian philosopher ever to apply the dialectic of Hegel to the Hegelian dialectic: Reflexionphilosophie = die Trägheit des Denkens.

IX. CONCLUSION: AMERICANISM VERSUS EUROPEAN MODERNITY

49/ How very simple indeed, to imagine all these wonderful Kripkean things, as we phantasize about our imaginary world, when in fact we only pretend and make–believe: What exciting pretensions are these, when we imagine ourselves as philosophers instead of sophists, following in the footsteps of a Saul Kripke. The miraculous power of our Kripkean imagination is no less illusory than a round square. After we translate our Kripkean intuitions into the political and economic realm of world history, how easy is the task of following the orders of our masters, as lemmings rush onwards in blind fury, as sleep–walkers we follow our amazing delusions into the graveyard of history. Do the unfortunate victims of our self–destruction really matter, since in some possible world they may be winners in high places, nay, emperors of the universe instead of destroyed beings condemned to a life of suffering and misery. After all, the evil results of our warped actions might never have ever been. What a very fun Kripkean game to play!

“How do I know that my own intuitions aren’t corrupted by exposure to Kripke, Putnam, et alii? I’m not sure, but I take comfort from the fact that if I am blind … my form of blindness is very widespread.”¹

50/ That Saul Kripke’s modal logic is corrupted by the modern European unreason of Kant’s Copernican revolution does not world historically entail that Kripkeanism is a dangerous obstacle to the supremacy of American superpower: As an instrument in the clearing away of the rubble of European modernity as Liberal Internationalism, Kripke’s modal logic is an American weapon of political and economic consequence. Kripke’s renovation of the transcendental distinction between critique and dogmatism, in the name of his modal “psychology” as Transzendentale Logik, the Copernican project of Quine and his circle, prepares the road for Chomsky and Rorty: They negatively uplift the new rift between Americanism and anti–Americanism upon the stage of world history, a power struggle which is American. Continental “philosophy,” in the strife between superior and inferior ruling classes, is the graveyard of modernity precisely because rational conceptions are not abstractions, but the lifeblood of world history: The universal historical clash between Kant and Hegel, whether between Kantian anti–Hegelianism versus Kantio–Hegelianism, otherwise between Kantian anti–Hegelianism and Kantio–Hegelianism versus Hegelian anti–Kantianism, especially as exemplified in the Cold War strife between Western Marxism and world communism, is evidenced in the collapse of the Soviet empire and rise of the Digital revolution, — the bastion of twenty–first century American Idealism.² Reason, in the speculative logical and dialectical system of the genuine Hegel’s philosophical science of absolute idealism, rises above the limitations of the understanding and resolves them as the true Notion: The ragged edges of Kripkean logic, once inscribed within the political and economic conceptualization of Global civilization, dissolve within the conceptual rationality of Americanism as the rational planetization of American Liberty in the world of today.

51/ Conceptual rationality takes the final step into the heights, flees not from the unsatisfactoriness of the categories of the understanding to sensuous existence: American Idealism destroys the analytico–logico–linguistic structure within the schools of Quine, Kripke, Chomsky and Rorty, as a vanishing phase of world history, and thereby extracts and eliminates the modern unreason of Neo–Kantianism within their delusional Liberal Internationalism (Cosmopolitan Globalism), which is forthwith inscribed within the conceptual rationality of Americanism as the twenty–first century “logic” of American superpower.

52/ The “logic of American superpower,” — high sounding words indeed! Of what use is such a world historical compendium in the age of Digital revolution?

“Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self–contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering into a post–historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’ … a great philosophical schism has opened within the West, and instead of mutual indifference, mutual antagonism threatens to debilitate both sides of the transatlantic community. Coming at a time in history when new dangers and crises are proliferating rapidly, this schism could have serious consequences. For Europe and the United States to decouple strategically has been bad enough. But what if the schism over ‘world order’ infects the rest of what we have known as the liberal West? Will the West still be the West? A few years ago such questions were unthinkable. After the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama assumed, along with the rest of us, that at the end of history the world’s liberal democracies would live in relative harmony. Conflicts would be between the West and ‘the rest,’ not within the [108] West itself. The world’s democracies, sharing common liberal, democratic principles, would ‘have no grounds on which to contest each other’s legitimacy.’ That reasonable assumption has been thrown into doubt. For it is precisely the question of legitimacy that is at issue today between Americans and Europeans — not the legitimacy of each other’s political institutions, perhaps, but of their differing visions of ‘world order.’ More to the point, it is the legitimacy of American power and American Global leadership that has come to be doubted by a majority of Europeans. America, for the first time since World War II, is suffering a crisis of international legitimacy.”³

53/ Transzendentale Logik that masquerades as the logic of world history is the modern unreason of inferior ruling classes (“the mistake of thinking that it is reason which is in contradiction with itself”): The imaginary logic of the worldhood of Saul Kripke’s imaginary world is the logic that inferior ruling classes deploy as they destroy themselves in the name of a far–greater logic of freedom, — within the world historical rationality of universal history. The imaginary world of Saul Kripke as modern European irrationalism, as applied in the twentieth century arena of politics and economics, is the propaganda and ideology of Bonapartism and Machiavellianism, — the power of the people and tyranny of the masses as a vanishing phase of universal history. The world historical clash between the Industrial and French revolutions is overcome in the Digital revolution, — the supremacy of American Liberty as Global civilization.

54/ As Descartes, when rightly interpreted, is the mouthpiece of the scientific revolution within philosophy, in the coming decades we will discover that the genuine Hegel of rational Hegelianism is the mastermind of Globalism as world civilization, — the anti–Copernican revolution of American Idealism as the supremacy of American Liberty in the Digital age.

Epilogue: Kripke’s Esoteric Doctrine

55/ Aloysius Martinich’s version of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity is drawn from Harvard’s revised (second) edition of 1980, despite being labelled in the table of contents as “1972.”¹ For this reason, likely, the citations for the edited material are not located with the endnotes of each selection, but rather are hidden–away at the very front of the volume, in very small text: The reference to the 1972 edition in the entry of the table of contents thus appears as a reference to the 1972 edition of Reidel, but not Harvard. Some questions naturally arise, first: Is Reidel’s 1972 (second) edition of “Naming and Necessity” exactly the same as the 1972 (first) edition? Secondly: Is the original 1970 Princeton Lectures version, the basis of the first publication of “Naming and Necessity,” at crucial junctures, the same as the first edition published by Reidel in 1972? The 1972 (first edition) contains an ellipsis between the text of pp. 295–296, which signals a break in the text (but not necessarily in the manuscripts or transcripts) and which means that parts of the original Princeton Lectures are missing from the Reidel edition:

“A subtle error, unknown through the decades, has still been unnoticed — or perhaps [296] not actually unnoticed, but the friends of Gödel …. So even if the conditions are not satisfied by a unique object the name may still refer.”²

56/ From his Princeton Lectures, key parts of Kripke’s crucial discussion of Gödel are excised from the published first edition. Humphreys and Fetzer in their “notes” only touch upon the philological and historical question of the hermeneutical differences between the various published editions and versions:

“Naming and Necessity was reissued in 1980 by Harvard University Press with a new preface by Kripke and as the author put it: ‘Obvious printing errors have been corrected, and slight changes have been made to make various sentences or formulations clearer.’ (Kripke (1980), p. 1).”³

57/ Obvious printing errors have been corrected, and slight changes have been made to make various sentences or formulations clearer? Here is an example from the 1972 Reidel edition: “Of course, it won’t be true in every other possible world that the star seen over there in the evening is the star seen over there in the morning, because there are possible worlds in which Phosphorus was not visible in the morning. But that shouldn’t be identified with the statement that Hesperus is Phosphorus.”⁴ Compare this passage with the later revised Harvard edition of 1980: “Of course, it is only a contingent truth (not true in every other possible world) that the star seen over there in the evening is the star seen over there in the morning, because there are possible worlds in which Phosphorus was not visible in the morning. But that contingent truth shouldn’t be identified with the statement that Hesperus is Phosphorus.”⁵ One cannot escape the fact that the words “contingent truth” are found twice in the revised edition, while in the first Reidel edition they are nowhere evidenced. The exact meaning that Kripke assigns to his “corrections,” in the name of “printing errors” and “clarity,” is worthy of some investigation: Kripke’s modification of sentences and formulations of the early edition of Naming and Necessity is effectuated in order to obstruct his critics, to hide the Kantian origins of his doctrine, and to escape the charge of Transcendentalism?

58/ Here is another example culled from the Reidel edition: “And of course there are widespread motivations — ideological, or just not wanting to have the nomological dangler of these mysterious connections not accounted for by laws of physics, one to one correlation between two different things, — a material state and something of an entirely different kind, — which lead people to want to believe this thesis.”⁶ Compare this passage with the later revised Harvard edition of 1980: “And of course there are widespread motivations — ideological, or just not wanting to have the ‘nomological dangler’ of mysterious connections not accounted for by the laws of physics, one to one correlations between two different kinds of thing, material states, and things of an entirely different kind, which lead people to want to believe this thesis.”⁷

59/ The generation of students (and the greater public at large) introduced to Kripkeanism in the 1970s, which spans the decade, were not exposed to the revised doctrine of Kripke which appeared in the Harvard edition of 1980. Did Kripke, within the halls of academia, amongst his closed circle of disciples, continue teaching the older doctrine, or another special version, distinct from the new Harvard edition? Investigation of the works of Kripke’s students, especially in politics and economics (at the municipal, state and federal levels), will resolve this question upon the stage of world history.

KRIPKE’S ORIGINAL PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LECTURES

60/ We know that the original transcriptions of the recordings of the 1970 Princeton Lectures were themselves edited, if they exist, since the Reidel edition contains many square bracketed and parenthetical insertions (as well as ellipses), which modify the meaning of the original text, either from the manuscripts or transcriptions: What is the editorial policy behind the revisions, was it from Reidel or Kripke himself, and what are the implications of these revisions with regards to the doctrines of the Quinean school at Harvard? — which greatly influenced the Western intelligentsia during the Cold War. How close did Kripke follow in the footsteps of Quine, his academic and intellectual associate since at least 1963. The editorial policy behind the first edition, with regards to the editing of the manuscripts or transcripts of the original Princeton Lectures, comes from the two editors of the Reidel edition, namely †Donald Herbert Davidson and †Gilbert Harman, otherwise from the series editors, Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Gabriel Nuchelmans and Wesley Charles Salmon (all of whom are now deceased), otherwise from other sources, — perhaps the editing of the manuscripts and/or transcripts for the first edition of Reidel was undertaken at the behest of Saul Kripke himself. What was the Cold War political and economic rationale behind the modifications?

61/ With regards to the original Princeton Lectures, given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, we must question whether transcriptions of recordings exist, since such lectures were regularly recorded in American academia: Should transcriptions of the original Princeton Lectures exist, they should be thoroughly compared to the extant recordings. There are instances of philosophical disputes which persist for decades after the fact (concerning the origin of various doctrines), and when the interested parties have gone back to the original recordings, they have discovered that the transcriptions made at the time, and passed down to posterity, are in certain regards defective, i.e., inexact or outright fraudulent.

62/ We may well wonder whether lecture notes of students (unauthorized) still exist, which will cast some further light upon the relationship between Kripke and Kantianism, either directly or indirectly:

“[260] Now, everyone remembers Kant (a bit) as making a distinction between ‘a priori’ and ‘analytic’ … I guess the traditional characterization from Kant goes something like: a priori truths are those which can be known independently of any experience … [264] The common examples of analytic statements, nowadays, are like ‘bachelors are unmarried.’ Kant, (someone just pointed out to me) gives as an example ‘gold is a yellow metal,’ which seems to me an extraordinary one, because it’s something I think that can turn out to be false.”⁸

63/ The world historical question remains: Is the methodological doctrine of Kripkean reference (Kripkean Transzendentale Logik) which is found in the 1972 and 1980 editions of Naming and Necessity, the very same one which Saul Kripke taught to his many university students over the years (adulterated or modified from his original manuscripts or transcriptions), at least since 1970, or did he propound another creed, as evidenced in the unadulterated and unedited text from the original Princeton Lectures and delivered at Princeton University, an esoteric teaching only for the select few, the elect of the Quinean–Kripkean School (the Anglo–American Vienna School of Austrian Neo–Kantianism), i.e., is Kripkeanism as a world historical complexification fully exposed in the hitherto published writings?⁹

64/ All interpretations of Kripkeanism, which neglect the questions above, are not themselves world historical, i.e., the rational interpretation of Kripkeanism upon the stage of world history: “Interpretations” which merely dress themselves in the garb of “possible worlds” are the phantasms and delusions of propaganda and ideology, — the foodstuff (soupistry) of modern European irrationalism.

65/ The secret of Kripke’s esoteric doctrine resides somewhere within his writings and publications, as well as the key works of his many students and followers, — especially upon the stage of twentieth century world history: Upon the heels of Quine and Kripke follow Chomsky and Rorty.

“[3] The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks has been a commonplace of our culture Hegel. Hegel’s historicism gave us a sense of how there might be genuine novelty in the development of thought and society. Such a historicist conception of thought and morals was, we may see by hindsight, rendered possible by Kant, himself the least historicist of philosophers. For Kant perfected and codified the two distinctions that are necessary to develop the notion of an ‘alternative conceptual framework’ — the distinction between spontaneity and receptivity and the distinction between necessary and contingent truth. Since Kant, we find it almost impossible not to think of the mind as divided into active and passive faculties, the former using concepts to ‘interpret’ what ‘the world’ imposes on the latter. We also find it difficult not to distinguish between those concepts which the mind could hardly get along without and those which it can take or leave alone — and we think of truths about the former concepts as ‘necessary’ in the most proper and paradigmatic sense of the term. But as soon as we have this picture of the mind in focus, it occurs to us, as it did to Hegel, that those all–important a priori concepts, those which determine what our experience of our morals will be, might have been different. We cannot, of course, imagine what an experience or a practice that different would be like, but we can abstractly suggest that the men of the Golden Age, or the inhabitants of the Fortunate Isles, or the mad, might shape the intuitions that are our common property in different molds, and might thus be conscious of a different ‘world’ … [4] The possibility of different conceptual schemes highlights the fact that Kantian unsynthesized intuition can exert no influence on how it is to be synthesized — or, at best, can exert only an influence we shall have to describe in a way as relative to a chosen conceptual scheme as our description of everything else. Insofar as a Kantian intuition is effable, it is just a perceptual judgment, and thus not merely ‘intuitive.’ Insofar as it is ineffable, it is incapable of having an explanatory function. This dilemma — a parallel to that which Hegelians raised concerning the thing–in–itself — casts doubt on the notion of a faculty of ‘receptivity.’ there seems no need to postulate an intermediary between the physical thrust of the stimulus upon organ and the full–fledged conscious judgment that the properly programmed organism forms in consequence. Thus there is no need to split the organism up into a receptive wax tablet on the one hand and an active ‘interpreter’ of what nature has there imprinted on the other. So the Kantian point that different a priori concepts would, if there could be such things, give a different phenomenal world gives place either to the straightforward but paradoxical claim that different concepts give us different worlds, or to dropping the notion of ‘conceptual framework’ altogether. ‘Phenomenal’ can no longer be given a sense, once Kantian ‘intuitions’ drop out. For the suggestion that our concepts shape neutral material no longer makes sense once there is nothing to serve as this material. The physical stimuli themselves are not a useful substitute, for the contrast between the ‘posits’ which the inventive mind constructs to predict and control stimuli, and the stimuli themselves, can be no more than a contrast between the effable world and its ineffable cause. The notion of alternative conceptual framework thus contains the seeds of doubt about the root notion of ‘conceptual framework,’ and so of its own destruction. For once the faculty of receptivity and, more generally, the notion of neutral material becomes dubious, doubt spreads easily to the notion of conceptual thought as ‘shaping’ and thus to the notion of the World–Spirit moving from one set of a priori concepts to the next. But the doubts about the Hegelian picture produced by an attack on the given/interpretation distinction are vague and diffuse by [5] comparison with those which result from attacking the necessary/contingent distinction. Quine’s suggestion that the difference between a priori and empirical truth is merely that between the relatively difficult to give up and the relatively easy brings in its train the notion that there is no clear distinction to be drawn between questions of meaning and questions of fact. This, in turn, leaves us (as Quine has pointed out in criticizing Carnap) with no distinction between questions about alternative ‘theories’ and and questions about alternative ‘frameworks.’ The philosophical notion of ‘meaning,’ against which Quine is protesting is, as he says, the latest version of the ‘idea idea’ — a philosophical tradition one of whose incarnations was the Kantian notion of ‘concept.’ The notion of a choice among ‘meaning postulates’ is the latest version of the notion of a choice among alternative conceptual schemes. Once the necessary is identified with the analytic and the analytic is explicated in terms of meaning, an attack on the notion of what Harman has called the ‘philosophical’ sense of meaning becomes an attack on the notion of ‘conceptual framework’ in any sense that assumes a distinction of kind between this notion and that of ‘empirical theory.’ So far we have seen how criticisms of givenness and analyticity both serve to dismantle the Kantian notion of ‘conceptual framework’ — the notion of ‘concepts necessary for the constitution of experience, as opposed to concepts whose application is necessary to control or predict experience.’ I have been arguing that without the notions of ‘the given’ and of ‘the a priori’ there can be no notion of ‘the constitution of experience.’ Thus there can be no notion of alternative experiences, or alternative worlds, to be constituted by the adoption of new a priori concepts.”¹⁰

E N D N O T E S

Author’s Note: The definitions of the English words in this work, especially the abstract nouns, generally follow the Compact Editions of the Oxford English Dictionaries published in the last half of the 20th century.

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein in Chryssi Sidiropoulou, “Wittgenstein’s Apophatic Descriptions,” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sotiris Mitralexis, editor, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, 49–80; 51. [Italics added]

See: “[1] He succeeds in carrying over a paradigm cases of such methods — to labour a theme of T.S. Kuhn — into the phase of normal science wherein their fundamental theoretical and methodological content will not be modified or called into question in any principle way … if one takes the view that from time immemorial mankind has found it easier to take on new ideas if these come to him in the guise of tradition, than in the awareness of a total break with existing forms of thought … [2] It is just such a shift of aspect that I treat in this present contribution to the history of the Brentano School, a movement which both initiated and defined the history of Austrian philosophy. It is against its background that one must understand the Vienna Circle, as I have already tried to show elsewhere. That Wittgenstein is to be understood exclusively from this perspective, as some would argue (perhaps overstating their case), would yield a too one–sided picture of this great thinker. But that it is impossible to evaluate him adequately without this perspective seems to me of little doubt. It is not my aim here however to investigate the genesis of Wittgenstein’s thought and the evolution of the Vienna Circle … [3] The birth of Austrian philosophy can be seen to lie in the appearance of the Psychology from an empirical standpoint in the year 1874 … In what respect can the Psychology from an empirical standpoint be conceived as signifying the terminus a quo of an independently Austrian development of philosophy? … Brentano’s philosophical programme was announced already in the fourth thesis of his Habilitation (1866): ‘Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est’ (‘The true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences’). This involves a two–fold claim: first, that the separation of an empirical and a transcendental method proposed by Kant was to be revoked, in favor of the former; and secondly that with the bringing to end of the methodological separation, as for example within the hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey onward, scientific standards — in the strict sense of the natural sciences — should at all events be retained … [4] Granted that the Kantian tradition of speculative philosophy, too, was concerned to proceed scientifically, and granted also that Kant himself, like his successors, wished to warrant experience in that they investigated the conditions of its possibility, still there are two essential differences which can be made out from even a superficial comparison of the two traditions. Kant’s Copernican Revolution — that is, the derivation of the laws of nature from the laws of human understanding, of a transcendental subject — was a philosophical revolution which was not undergone by Austrian philosophers. Austrian philosophy is largely characterized indeed, in opposition to all transcendental and idealistic tendencies, by its realistic line.” Rudolf Haller, “Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy,” Questions on Wittgenstein, New York, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988, 1–26; 1–2–3–4.

Remarks: Rudolf Haller’s aim is not “to investigate the genesis of Wittgenstein’s thought and the evolution of the Vienna Circle.” (Italics added) Instead Haller is blinded by his inexact historiography of world history: “Kant’s Copernican Revolution — that is, the derivation of the laws of nature from the laws of human understanding, of a transcendental subject — was a philosophical revolution which was not undergone by Austrian philosophers.” In other words, Haller makes Austrian philosophy begin with Brentano: “The birth of Austrian philosophy can be seen to lie in the appearance of the Psychology from an empirical standpoint in the year 1874.” According to Rudolf Haller, Austrians first started to “philosophize” in 1874! In order to downplay the existence of Neo–Kantianism in Austrian philosophy, and thereby save Wittgenstein and themselves from the charge of modern unreason, and thus salvage the “Cosmopolitanism” of their masters from the historical crime of political and economic irrationalism (“the inescapable lesson of history,” Hegel), Kantian anti–Hegelians are swept onto the side of Kantio–Hegelianism in the rough and tumble of world history: “If one takes the view that from time immemorial mankind has found it easier to take on new ideas if these come to him in the guise of tradition, than in the awareness of a total break with existing forms of thought.” Haller takes the “view” of “time immemorial” in his endeavor to immunize Wittgenstein from the charge of Neo–Kantianism. Why exactly the thought of Austrians before 1874 is not “philosophical,” or what exactly he means by Austrian philosophy, as opposed to sophistry, Rudolf Haller never elucidates. Rudolf Haller betrays his Kantian affiliations when he places Kant on the side of philosophy rather than sophistry: “The Kantian tradition of speculative philosophy.” In their struggle between Kant and Hegel, sophists are victims of the modern unreason of Locke, Leibniz, Hume and Kant: Despite their assertions to the contrary, their sophistical and “non–Kantian” analyses of world history flounder upon the selfsame subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism of European modernity. “It is impossible to evaluate him [Wittgenstein] adequately without this perspective seems to me of little doubt … [The] Austrian development of philosophy.” [Italics added] When the fogies erupt into their loud chorus of righteous indignation (at being placed alongside the ideologues in world history), with their shrieks of outrage and laments of dismay, — we respond honestly: Ladies and gentlemen, the last hundred years are over and done, we live in the age of Digital revolution and twenty first century American Idealism.

See: “Kantians hold that Kant is a great philosopher, while anti–Kantians hold that Kant is a Sophist. Those academics who maintain that Kant is a great philosopher, and that they disagree with his philosophy (and that therefore they are anti–Kantians), really mean that they disagree with a certain interpretation of some element of Kantianism (but they do not reject Kantianism in general as sophistry): Precise examination of their “philosophies” proves that they themselves are actually Kantians in disguise, pushing Kantianism, or some version thereof, under some other name, i.e., existentialism, phenomenology, empiricism, and so forth, wherein are covertly imported transcendental arguments and distinctions under new names, — a tactic calculated to avoid serious criticism of their doctrines, which allows them to pass themselves off as intellectual innovators, especially in the arena of politics and economics. They are thereby saved from explaining how Kantianism is not raciology, saved from explaining the role of Kantianism in the Holocaust, and saved from explaining the difference between reason and unreason in twentieth century modern European history, especially the history of Genocide and nationalism.” Christopher Richard Wade Dettling, Kant’s Transcendental Concept of Race: Kantianism and Raciology, San Francisco, California, The Medium Corporation, 2019.

2. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, London, Williams & Norgate, 1912, 34–249. [Italics added]

See: “We shall not deny that there may be a metaphysical ego. We shall merely say that it is a question that does not concern us in any way, because it is a matter about which we know nothing and can know nothing, and therefore it obviously cannot be a thing that comes into science in any way. What we know is this string of experiences that makes up a person, and that is put together by means of certain empirically given relations, such, e.g., as memory.” Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918): VIII. Excursus Into Metaphysics: What There Is,” Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, Robert Charles Marsh, editor, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1956, 175–281; 269–281; 277. [Italics added]

3. Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1981, 5. [1960] [Italics added]

See: “[39] Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill–founded ... [49] The dogma of reductionism, even in its attenuated form, is intimately connected with the other dogma — that there is a cleavage between the analytic and the synthetic. We have found ourselves led, indeed, from the latter problem to the former through the verification theory of meaning. More directly, the one dogma clearly supports the other in this way: as long as it is taken to be significant in general to speak of the confirmation and infirmation of a statement, it seems significant to speak also of a limiting kind of statement which is vacuously confirmed, ipso facto, come what may; and such a statement is analytic. The two dogmas are, indeed, at root identical ... [50] we can imagine recalcitrant experiences to which we would surely be inclined to accommodate our system by re–evaluating just the statement that there are brick houses on Elm Street, together with related statements on the same topic. We can imagine other recalcitrant experiences to which we would be inclined to accommodate our system by reevaluating just the statement that there are no centaurs, along with kindred statements. A recalcitrant experience can, I have urged, be accommodated by any of [51] various alternative reevaluations in various alternative quarters of the total system; but, in the cases which we are now imagining, our natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon these specific statements concerning brick houses or centaurs. These statements are felt, therefore, to have a sharper empirical reference than highly theoretical statements of physics or logic or ontology. The latter statements may be thought of as relatively centrally located within the total network, meaning merely that little preferential connection with any particular sense data obtrudes itself ... [52] Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism.” Willard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, 39–52; 39–49–50–51–52. [1985+1990] [Italics added]

See also: “No wonder that the more incisive reappraisal of the old quandary by W.V.O. Quine led him back to the conclusion reached by Kant: That the grounds on which instances are assigned to an empirical category of objects are inscrutable.” Michael Polanyi & Harry Prosch, Meaning, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1975, 52.

Remarks: American Idealism affirms the rationality of the rational conceptualization of the “physical world” as conceptualized in scientific cognition: We categorically reject all talk of “physical phenomena,” especially as deployed by the Kantian traditions upon the stage of world history, as infected by the Transzendentale Logik of reflective understanding, — modern European subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism.

See: “To an astonishing degree, modern philosophy of science traces its heritage to the Vienna Circle, a small philosophical group … that met regularly during the 1920s.” Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Science and Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Basic Works of Logical Empiricism: The Legacy of the Vienna Circle: Modern Reappraisals, vol. 6, Sahotra Sarkar, editor, New York/London, Garland Publishing Inc., 1996, 77–120; 80–81.

4. Saul Aaron Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Identity and Individuation, Milton Karl Munitz, editor, New York: New York University Press, 1971, 135–164; 138–139–140: “[138] That, too, is an issue I do not want to go into in detail except to be very dogmatic about it. It was I think settled quite well by Bertrand Russell in his notion of the scope of a description … I just dogmatically [140] want to drop that question here.” [Italics added]

5. Gérard Debreu, “Preface,” Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium (Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University), New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1971, ix–xi; x. [1959] [Italics added]

See: “The theory of value is treated here with the standards of rigor of the contemporary formalist school of mathematics. The effort toward rigor substitutes correct reasonings and results for incorrect ones, but it offers other rewards too. It usually leads to a deeper understanding of the problems to which it is applied, and this has not failed to happen in the present case. It may also lead to a radical change of mathematical tools … Allegiance to rigor dictates the axiomatic form of the analysis where the theory, in the strict sense, is logically entirely disconnected from its interpretations. In order to bring out fully this disconnectedness, all the definitions, all the hypotheses, and the main results of the theory, in the strict sense, are distinguished by italics; moreover, the transition from the informal discussion of interpretations to the formal construction of the theory is often marked by one of the expressions: ‘in the language of the theory,’ ‘for the sake of the theory,’ ‘formally.’ Such a dichotomy reveals all the assumptions and the logical structure of the analysis. It also makes possible immediate extensions of that analysis without modification of the theory by simple reiterations of concepts.” Gérard Debreu, Ibidem. [Italics added]

See also: “The reading of this chapter requires no knowledge of mathematics. This is, admittedly, true only ‘in principle.’ It certainly requires an ability to think abstractly [sic], which is usually developed through the practice of mathematics, and an ability to assimilate in a short time [2] a certain number of new concepts the motivation for which will not always be clear at first. On the other hand, the expert will notice that the logical foundations of set theory and even an elementary knowledge of the integers are taken for granted.” Gérard Debreu, “Chapter 1: Mathematics,” Ibidem, 1–27; 1–2. [Italics added]

See also: Kenneth Joseph Arrow, Patrick Suppes & Samuel Karlin, Mathematical Models in the Social Sciences, 1959: Proceedings of the First Stanford Symposium, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1960.

See: “I want to express my warmest gratitude to Dr. A. Hofstadter, Mr. L.K. Krader, Professor E. Nagel, Professor W.V. Quine, Mr. M.G. White and especially Dr. J.C.C. McKinsey and Dr. P.P. Wiener, who were unsparing in their advice and assistance while I was preparing the English edition. I also owe many thanks to Mr. K.J. Arrow [Kenneth Joseph Arrow, 1921–2017] for his help in reading proofs.” Alfred Tarski, “Preface,” Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences, enlarged and revised edition, Olaf Helmer, translator, New York, Oxford University Press, 1941, xi–xvi; xvi. [1936]

See finally: “There is perhaps a certain analogy between Wittgenstein’s private language argument and Ludwig von Mises’s celebrated argument concerning economic calculation under socialism … According to Mises, a rational economic calculator (say, the manager of an industrial plant) who wishes to choose the most efficient means to achieve given ends must compare alternative courses of action for cost effectiveness. To do this, he needs an array of prices (e.g., of raw materials, or machinery) set by others. If one agency set all prices, it could have no rational basis to choose between alternative courses of action. (Whatever seemed to it to be right would be right, so one cannot talk about right) … my impression is that although it is usually acknowledged that Mises’s argument points to a real difficulty for centrally planned economies, it is now almost universally rejected as a theoretical proposition.” Saul Aaron Kripke, “On Rules and Private Language (1982),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, 524–537; 537. [1985+1990]

Introduction: Saul Kripke and Modern Irrationalism

1. Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, 20 January 1970),” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral sciences), vol. 40, 2nd edition, Donald Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Gabriel Nuchelmans & Wesley Charles Salmon, series editors, Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972, 253–355; 288. [1970+1972]

Remarks: The following world historical conceptualization of the theoretical foundations of Saul Kripke’s modal logic conceptualizes how modal thought, in the sense of imagination and intuition, is politically and economically inscribed within the Cold War conjuncture of Western civilization in the last half of the twentieth century, in the strife between Americanism and anti–Americanism, born from out of the struggle between capitalism and communism: In the Digital revolution the modern European clash between the Industrial and French revolutions is overcome as a vanishing stage of world history in the supremacy of American Liberty. The inescapable lesson of history, the world historical conceptualization of the origins of the Digital revolution as the birth of Cosmism, is the conceptualization of the logic of twenty–first century American superpower as the world historical rationality of Americanism: The universal historical logic of Americanism as the developmental unification and coaxial integration of the American world, is the rational planetization of American Liberty in the world of today. The logic of mathematics is inscribed within the realm of Global politics and economics, but the resultant inscription is conceptualized world historically, i.e., according to the rational calculations of the American Idealists of the White House, Washington and Wall Street.

See: “On January 20th, 22nd, and 29th 1970 Saul Kripke delivered three lectures at Princeton University. They produced something of a sensation. In the lectures he argued, amongst other things, that many names in ordinary language referred to objects directly rather than by means of associated descriptions; that causal chains from language user to language user were an important mechanism for preserving reference; that there were necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori truths; that identity relations between rigid designators were necessary; and argued, more tentatively, that materialist identity theories in the philosophy of mind were suspect. Interspersed with this was a considerable amount of material on natural kind terms and essentialism. As a result of these lectures and a related 1971 paper, ‘Identity and Necessity’ (Kripke [1971]), talk of rigid designators, Hesperus and Phosphorus, meter bars, gold and H2O, and suchlike quickly became commonplace in philosophical circles and when the lectures were published under the title Naming and Necessity in the collection The Semantics of Natural Language (Davidson and Harman [1972]), that volume became the biggest seller in the Reidel (later Kluwer) list. The cluster of theses surrounding the idea that a relation of direct reference exists between names and their referents is now frequently referred to as ‘The New Theory of Reference.’ On December 28, 1994, Quentin Smith read a paper at the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association that produced a different kind of sensation. In his paper, Smith suggested that most of the major ideas in the New Theory of Reference had been developed by Ruth Barcan Marcus in the period between 1946 and 1961. Smith argued that Kripke had erroneously been given credit for these ideas and, more contentiously, that Kripke had heard some of these ideas at a lecture Marcus gave in February 1962, had unconsciously assimilated them (while not properly understanding them at the time) and had later incorporated them into his Princeton lectures.” Paul W. Humphreys & James H. Fetzer, editors, “Introduction,” The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins, John P. Burgess, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Sten Lindström, Quentin Smith & Scott Soames, contributors, Dordrecht/Boston/London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, vii–xi; vii.

See finally: “Naming and Necessity was reissued in 1980 by Harvard University Press with a new preface by Kripke and as the author put it: ‘Obvious printing errors have been corrected, and slight changes have been made to make various sentences or formulations clearer.’ (Kripke (1980), p. 1).” Paul W. Humphreys & James H. Fetzer, editors, “Notes,” The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins, John P. Burgess, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Sten Lindström, Quentin Smith & Scott Soames, contributors, Dordrecht/Boston/London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, xii–xiii; xii.

2. Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, 20 January 1970),” Ibidem, 289.

See: “Aristotle’s most important properties consist in his philosophical work, and Hitler’s in his murderous political role; both, as I have said, might have lacked these properties altogether. Surely there was no logical fate hanging over either Aristotle or Hitler which made it in any sense inevitable that they should have possessed the properties we regard as important to them; they could have had careers completely different from their actual ones … I say that a designator is rigid, and designates the same thing in all possible worlds.” Saul Kripke, Ibidem, 289. [Italics added]

See: “He [Saul Kripke] was appointed to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1963, became an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rockefeller University, New York in 1968, and was appointed the McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University in 1977. In 1973, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford … He became Professor Emeritus at Princeton in 1998 ... Kripke, first with his formal interpretation of modal logic and later with his lectures on the nature of necessity and language, had a major role in [xii] changing the direction of contemporary philosophy … [1] To understand Kripke’s early work, it will be helpful to begin by briefly reviewing developments in logic through the twentieth century … [6] What are we asserting when we claim that it is possible for Al Gore to have won the US presidential election in 2000 or when we assert that Al Gore is human? What is the correct philosophical interpretaion of such claims? Kripke offered an answer to both questions.” Gregory W. Fitch, Saul Kripke, Montréal/Kingston/Ithaca, McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2004, xi–xii–1–6.

3. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, 20 January 1970),” Ibidem, 289.

See: “[xi] Kripke, first with his formal interpretation of modal logic and later with his lectures on the nature of necessity and language, had a major role in [xii] changing the direction of contemporary philosophy. He argued that many of the ‘received’ views in philosophy that had led to the rejection of metaphysics were not only mistaken, but deeply mistaken. Part of the problem, according to Kripke, was a faulty theory of reference. Kripke argued that if one rejected the traditional theory of reference in favor of a more direct theory, then the accepted view of the relationship between the epistemic status of a statement and its metaphysical status might be questioned. The framework that Kripke developed to consider these questions has expanded philosophical discussion and has led to some surprising results. It is a tribute to Kripke’s genius that he has contributed groundbreaking results in both mathematical logic and philosophy … [xiii] Roughly speaking, Kripke says that a rigid designator is an expression or phrase that designates the same thing in every possible world. Yet it turns out that there are distinct ways of understanding the basic idea. For a long time, for example, I understood Kripke to mean that a term α is a rigid designator provided that α designates the same object at each world whether or not that object exists in that world. This was the view that David Kaplan (1989a: 570, n.8) had thought to be Kripke’s as well. But Kaplan reports that Kripke has written him to say that his view is neutral with respect to whether or not names designate objects at a world in which the object in question does not exist (see pp. 36–7). Hence we were wrong in our initial interpretations of what Kripke meant.” Fitch, “Introduction,” Ibidem, xiii.

See also: “According to Kripke, proper names in natural language are rigid designators. That is, a proper name that designates some object in our world, designates the same object in every possible world in which that object exists (Naming and Necessity (NN), pp. 48–9) and does not designate any different object in any other possible world (more on this last clause below). For example, the proper name ‘Plato’ is a rigid designator, since in a sentence describing a counterfactual situation, for instance, Plato would not have been a philosopher had he died as a child, it designates the same individual that it designates in sentences about the actual world, namely Plato.” Hanoch Ben–Yami, “Why Rigidity?” Naming, Necessity and More: Explorations in the Philosophical Work of Saul Kripke, Jonathan Berg, editor; Gilead Bar–Elli, Hanoch Ben–Yami, Meir Buzaglo, Eli Dresner, Paul Horwich, Saul Aaron Kripke, Teresa Robertson, Nathan Salmon, Oron Shagrir, Mark Steiner, contributors, Cham, Switzerland, Springer/Basingstoke, United Kingdom & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 3–21; 3.

See finally: “How could rigid designation not be based on some deeper semantic property like direct reference? It couldn’t be an accident that names were rigid and descriptions were not.” David Kaplan, “Afterthoughts,” Themes From Kaplan, Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein, editors, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989, 565–614; 571.

Remarks: Saul Kripke’s “logical and modal” salvage operation of Kantian anti–Hegelianism (“the accepted view of the relationship between the epistemic status of a statement and its metaphysical status might be questioned”) within the arena of “philosophy,” in contradistinction to Kantio–Hegelianism, does not evacuate the unreason of European modernity from the world historical arena of politics and economics in the name of reason, but rather serves as a weapon for the destruction of this selfsame political and economic irrationalism, but is not advanced as a replacement: The Kripkean logical distinction between the European Left and Right, via the reconciliation of radical and moderate Liberals in the name of Transzendentale Logik, feeds the world historical flames of political and economic destruction, — the modern irrationalists follow their piper’s heady tune into the gulf of oblivion, as a vanishing phase of world history (“the framework that Kripke developed … has led to some surprising results). In the world of today, the soixante huitards are unceremoniously dumped into the boneyards, while their erstwhile “social contributions” are invested in the backwards cartels, outdated monopolies and corrupt trusts of inferior ruling classes, which in turn accelerates the demise of modern political and economic irrationalism, under the floodtide of Americanism in the world: Indeed, the soixante huitards, oblivious to their fate, embrace their folly with open arms, as the mental victims of satanic cults drink their deadly Kool–Aid; as sleepwalkers they follow their political masters into the great beyond, their flabby minds polluted by modern unreason. Beware, those who seek to save them from their own self–destruction, for their saviors are repaid with scorn and abuse: Their demise is the fertile seedbed of a higher political and economic order, as the supremacy of American Liberty in the world of today.

4. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, 20 January 1970),” Ibidem, 264.

See: “When I hear the name ‘Hitler,’ I do feel it’s sort of analytic that that man was evil. But really, probably not. Hitler might have spent all his days in quiet in Linz.” Kripke, Ibidem, 288.

Remarks: The famous analytic–synthetic distinction of our Kantian intelligentsia is the basis of their Anglo–American Transzendentale Logik, especially as outlined in Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”

5. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: Zwei Bände in einem Band Ungekürzte Ausgabe, 851–855 Auflage, München, Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H., 1943, 328.

Remarks: We translate “Reinster Idealismus deckt sich unbewußt mit tiefster Erkenntnis” roughly as “Pure Idealism is Profound Knowledge of the Unknowable or Unconscious.” The German phrase “reinster Idealismus” is not read as pure reason in the strictly Kantio–Hegelian sense, but rather as “deutsche Idealismus” in the Kantian anti–Hegelian sense of Chamberlain, Rosenberg and Goebbels, i.e., as transcendental idealism unadulterated with the so–called anti–German idealism of Kantio–Hegelianism as Marxism, Bolshevism and Communism: The political and economic irrationalism of Hitlerite raciology aims at the purification of the “Germanic race” (German nation state) of foreign accretions and influences, — in the name of reinster Idealismus as German Idealism, i.e., modern European irrationalism as German Bonapartism and Machiavellianism.

See: “[49] Ja, die guten Zeiten der Bonzenherrlichkeit [Beifall] (sind vorbei. Ein neues Deutschland steht auf, — ein Deutschland, erzogen in den spartanischen Gesetzen preußischer Pflichterfüllung. Ein Deutschland, das sich nicht fettgefressen, sondern großgehungert hat! Ein Deutschland der Kraft, des Willens und des Idealismus! Ein Deutschland, das dem marxistischen Verrat) und der bürgerlichen Leisetreterei den Fehde(handschuh) vor die Füße geworfen hat! … [50] Wir haben es diesen materialistischen Bonzen gezeigt, daß in Deutschland noch ein Idealismus lebt. Wir haben es ihnen gezeigt, daß man aus Hunger und aus Opfer und Not einem Volk wieder den Weg nach oben zeigen kann … [55] Die deutschen Dome in Ulm und Straßburg und Freiburg, die Bildwerke eines Albrecht Dürer, die geistigen Zeugnisse eines Kant und Schopenhauer, die Lyrik Goethes und Mörikes, das dramatische Genie eines Friedrich von Schiller, die Neunte Symphonie und die letzten Streichquartette Beethovens, die preußische Staatsidee eines Friedrich Wilhelm I. und Friedrich des Einzigen, die Reichsschöpfung eines Bismarck, — sie alle sind die beglückenden Ergebnisse jener schöpferischen Kulturfähigkeit des deutschen Volkes, die auf dem Boden des deutschen Nationalcharakters emporschoß … [134] Wenn ich also heute der ganzen Kriegszielforderung der deutschen Nation eine andere Nuance gebe, wenn ich sage: Es geht jetzt nicht darum, wer die tiefere Philosophie besitzt oder die höhere religiöse Überzeugung — für diesen Kampf um Ideale hat Deutschland in den vergangenen drei Jahrhunderten einen hinreichenden Tribut gezollt — , sondern jetzt wollen wir auch um das kämpfen, um das die anderen dreihundert [135] Jahre in der Vergangenheit gekämpft haben, nämlich um einen vollgedeckten Tisch! … [152] Die brauchen gar nicht Goethe und Schiller zu kennen und brauchen nicht die Kantsche Philosophie studiert zu haben, sondern die brauchen nur zu wissen: Es geht um mein Vaterland und es geht um eine soziale neue Heilslehre und es geht für Hitler und es geht für die Erneuerung meines Landes und meines Volkes — das genügt vollkommen! So ist das auch heute!” Josef Goebbels, Goebbels Reden: 1932–1945, Helmut Heiber, hrsg., Bindlach, Bavaria, Gondrom, 1991, 49–55–134–135–152.

See: “Hier findet sich heiligste Selbstaufopferung neben beschranktester Selbstsucht, reinster Idealismus neben krassestem Materialismus.” Richard Nicolaus Coudenhove–Kalergi (1894–1972), Adel, Leipzig, Verlag der Neue Geist/Dr. Peter Reinhold, 1922, 41. [Italics added]

See: “Jacobi widerlegt zu viel und darum widerlegt er Nichts. Ich meine, dass eine solche Polemik von vornherein in den Verdacht gerathen muss, eine unklare zu sein, die das punctum saliens der Irrthümer des Gegners nicht erfasst hat, ja, es wird die Vermuthung in uns entstehen, dass jenes angegriffene System, welches zugleich reinster Idealismus und doch wieder das Ideal des Empirismus sein soll, eben keines von beiden ist, sondern ein Neues, welches sich unter keine von diesen beiden Kategorien endgültig subsumiren lässt, dass dem Beurtheiler [12] nur das Organ gefehlt habe, dieses Neue in seiner Eigenthümlichkeit zu erfassen.” Julius Lachmann, F.H. Jacobi’s Kantkritik: Inaugural–Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde der philosophischen Fakultät der Friedrichs–Universität zu Halle Vorgelegt und nebst den Angehängten Thesen a.m. 18. Juli 1881 um 11 uhr Öffentliche zu Vertheidigen, Halle, A./S., 1881, 11–12. [Italics added]

I/ Saul Kripke and “Contemporary Philosophy”

1. See: “[93] To some extent it is possible to categorize important philosophical work as speculative or critical. Speculative philosophy tries to construct theories about reality, or the cosmos, or whatnot, in order to explain problematic features of what little we actually know about it … The word ‘critical’ comes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason … Leibniz vainly imagined (thought Kant) that reason can know the ultimate constituents of the universe. But no answer to the question ‘What is the world ultimately composed of?’ can be right. Kant elaborated his Critique partly in order to explain how such questions sound all right, while the very asking of them is a fundamental error. Roughly speaking, speculative philosophy confronts a problem by constructing a theory that will solve the problem. Critical philosophy confronts a similar problem by showing that the problem is of a sort that cannot have an answer, and explains why we should have been misled into supposing it has an answer … [94] Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an analysis of the possibilities of and preconditions for knowledge … I shall present a critical philosophy which is more easily grasped than Kant’s. Although it is in many ways as ambitious as Kant’s, it is much less complex. Its key word is ‘verification,’ and it originated in Vienna.” Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, 93–94.

2. Saul Aaron Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Identity and Individuation, Milton Karl Munitz, editor, New York, New York University Press, 1971, 135–164; 138–139.

3. Bertrand Russell, German Social Democracy: Six Lectures, With an Appendix on Social Democracy and the Woman Question in Germany by Alys Russell, London and New York, Longmans, Green and Company, 1896, 2–163.

4. Bertrand Russell (1963) in Harvey Arthur DeWeerd, Lord Russell’s War Crimes Tribunal, Santa Monica, The RAND Corporation, 1967, 4.

See: “We cannot obey these murderers [Kennedy Administration]. They are abominable. They are the wickedest people who ever lived in the history of man and it is our duty to do what we can against them.” Bertrand Russell (1 April 1961) in Ibidem, 3.

5. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, 20 January 1970),” Ibidem, 264–288.

6. Saul Aaron Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Identity and Individuation, Milton Karl Munitz, editor, New York, New York University Press, 1971, 135–164; 135–162–163.

7. Saul Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Ibidem, 137–138.

8. Kripke, Ibidem, 137–138–148–162.

9. Kripke, Ibidem, 135. [Italics added]

See: “One can hold that certain statements of identity between names, though often known a posteriori, and maybe not knowable a priori, are in fact necessary, [154] if true … Let us see what the evidence is. First, recall the remark that I made that proper names seem to be rigid designators, as when we use the name ‘Nixon’ to talk about a certain man, even in counterfactual situations. If we say, ‘If Nixon had not written the letter to Saxbe, maybe he would have gotten Carswell through,’ we are in this statement talking about Nixon, Saxbe, and Carswell, the very same men as in the actual world, and what would have happened to them under certain counterfactual circumstances. If names are rigid designators, then there can be no question about identities being necessary, because ‘a’ and ‘b’ will be rigid designators of a certain man or thing x. Then even in every possible world, a and b will both refer to the same object x, and to no other, and so there will be no situation in which a might not have been b. That would have to be a situation in which the object which we are also now calling ‘x’ would not have been identical with itself.” Kripke, Ibidem, 153–154.

10. Kripke, Ibidem, 158. [Italics added]

See: “Let me turn to the case of heat and the motion of molecules. Here surely is a case that is contingent identity! Recent philosophy has emphasized this again and again. So, if it is a case of contingent identity, then let us imagine under what circumstances it would be false. Now, concerning this statement I hold that the circumstances philosophers apparently have in mind as circumstances under which it would have false are not in fact such circumstances.” Kripke, Ibidem, 158. [Italics added]

11. Immanuel Kant, “Introduction: VII. — Idea and Division of a Particular Science, Under the Name of a Critique of Pure Reason,” Critique of Pure Reason, revised edition, John M. Dow Meiklejohn, translator, introduction & Brandt V.B. Dixon, special introduction, New York, The Colonial Press, 1900, 1–18; 15–18; 15. [Italics added]

12. Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity (1972),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, 255–270; 258–259–261. [1985+1990] [Italics added]

II/ Wittgenstein’s Epistemology

1. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, vii–viii–ix–1.

Remarks: Is it mere coincidence that the publishers of Saul Kripke’s book on Wittgenstein also published the latter’s Philosophical Investigations? We think not. The media combines of the backwards cartels, outdated monopolies and corrupt trusts produce the propaganda of inferior ruling classes, — in the name of modern European political and economic irrationalism (Bonapartism and Machiavellianism), as the Copernican revolution of Liberal Internationalism.

2. (1.1) “Since I first encountered the ‘private language argument’ and the later Wittgenstein generally, and (2) since I came to think about it in the way expounded here (1962–3).” (1.2) Since I first encountered the “private language argument” (of Wittgenstein) and (2). (1.3) Since I first encountered the “private language argument” (but not of Wittgenstein) and (2). (1.4) Since I first encountered the later Wittgenstein generally and (2). (1.5) Since I first generally encountered the “private language argument” (of Wittgenstein) together with the later Wittgenstein and (2). (1.6) Since I first encountered the “private language argument” (of Wittgenstein) together with the later Wittgenstein generally and (2). (1.7) Since I first encountered the “private language argument” (of Wittgenstein), and since I first encountered the later Wittgenstein generally, but not both of them at the same time, and (2).

3. Kripke, Ibidem, 2–3–5.

Remarks: Commentators who deal with Kripke’s Wittgenstein in a piecemeal fashion, and then utilize the resultant “analyses” in their rendering of judgment upon Kripke’s modal epistemology, suffer from the defects of inexact historiography, — they refuse to enter the field of exact historiography and world history precisely because in so doing, their own political and economic allegiance to inferior ruling classes is exposed, i.e., they lack the conceptual power to explain themselves. This is not to say that some have lacked the courage, for certain have embarked upon the perilous journey of “interpreting” historiography in conjunction with their analyses of Kripkean modality, thereby successfully passing from the camp of Kantian anti–Hegelianism into the opposing fortress of Kantio–Hegelianism (a rare political and economic feat), — yet they are alike plagued by the modern unreason of pseudo–Hegelianism and anti–Hegelianism, itself resultant from their impure Hegelianism.

See: “To understand Kripke’s early work, it will be helpful to begin by briefly reviewing developments in logic through the twentieth century.” Gregory W. Fitch, “Necessity,” Saul Kripke, Montréal/Kingston/Ithaca, McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2004, 1–26; 1.

Remarks: †Gregory W. Fitch never really elucidates what exactly he means by the phrase “developments in logic” within world history, whether as logical developments of history or historical developments of logic: We wonder if what Fitch names as historical development (development within history) is itself logical, for his entire discussion of early twentieth century logic, with regards to Saul Kripke, lasts only a handful of pages at best. Nevertheless, Fitch affirms, “Kripke’s work in modal logic was to have a major influence on the development of modal logic and philosophy in the future.” [Italics added] Ibidem, 1.

Modern sophists use Kripkean modal logic to prove that their “philosophies” of Americanism as Liberal Internationalism are scientific, because their political and economic rationale is the “logic of science,” i.e., their version of the logic of the “physical sciences,” — as a method of justifying the policies of Democrats, in opposition to Republicans. American Idealism turns its back upon such political and economic sophistry, since conceptual rationality in the world of today overcomes the rough and tumble of political and economic partisanship, whether Republican or Democrat: Modern unreason, especially within the world historical arena of European politics and economics, whether as liberalism or conservatism, left–wing or right–wing, centrist (moderate) or extremist, is always the mortal corruption of subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism, — as a vanishing phase of world history.

III/ Kripkean Epistemological Psychology

1. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 144–145–146.

2. Kripke, Ibidem, 147–148.

3. Remarks: Indeed, the historical period from Quine, Kripke, Chomsky and Rorty, is the death–knell of Anglo–American Neo–Kantianism as a viable “philosophical” project, whether as Kantian anti–Hegelianism or Kantio–Hegelianism: The Copernican revolution, as the cosmopolitanism of Liberal Internationalism, is bankrupt in the world of today, destroyed upon the rocks of Digital revolution. Who is the master of the Digital revolution? The master of Digital revolution is the White House, Washington and Wall Street.

See: “Somehow we read Wittgenstein without Kant … even Wittgenstein himself, although well–versed in Kantianism (at least in the period of Tractatus, when he read The Critique of Pure Reason extensively) … did not recognize how Kant’s philosophy could be juxtaposed with his sceptical discoveries.” Przemyslaw Tacik, “On the Kantian Answer to ‘Kripkenstein’s’ Rule–Following Paradox,” Problems of Normativity, Rules and Rule–Following, Michał Araszkiewicz, Paweł Banaś, Tomasz Gizbert–Studnicki & Krzysztof Płeszka, editors, Cham, Switzerland, Springer, 2015, 67–82; 68.

See: “Kripke cannot be said to be a system–building philosopher like Kant.” Gregory W. Fitch, “Introduction,” Saul Kripke, New York/London, Routledge, 2014, xi–xiv; xiii. [2004]

IV/ Correspondence Theory as Identitätsphilosophie

1. Saul Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Identity and Individuation, Milton Karl Munitz, editor, New York, New York University Press, 1971, 135–164; 162.

See: “[Kripke’s] Naming and Necessity and ‘Identity and Necessity’ were given as talks, and, as we all know, there is never enough time in a talk or series of talks for us to cover all the things we had intended to cover.” Christopher Hughes, “Preface,” Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004, vii–ix; viii.

Remarks: Saul Kripke published his lectures (unlike Hegel’s posthumously edited and published materials in the Berlin edition), during his own lifetime, and therefore historically they constitute his doctrine: That Kripke later repudiated some of his earlier positions does not affect the historical fact that his sophisms have influenced earlier generations of youngsters, especially in the arena of American politics and economics.

See also: “[vii] Kripke is one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century; his best–known work (Naming and Necessity) is arguably the single most important contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of language in the last fifty years … [4] Suppose that on a theory of proper names, where n is an arbitrarily chosen proper name, there is always a definite description — either an ordinary definite description, or one of the sort ‘the thing with most (or a weighted most) of such–and–such properties’ — free from proper names, demonstratives, or indexicals, such that it is necessary, analytic, and knowable a priori that a thing is n if and only if it is the satisfier of that definite description. Then we may [5] call that theory of proper names a (pure) descriptivist theory of proper names. (Pure) descriptivist theories of proper names are the principal target of Lecture II of Naming and Necessity … [9] In the ‘Naming and Necessity’ lectures Kripke … aims to persuade his audience that the (pure) descriptivist ‘picture’ of how proper names refer is mistaken … for the pure descriptivist, there is a (purely) qualitative definite description such that necessarily a thing is Hesperus if and only if it satisfies that description … [11] I have no idea what purely qualitative definite description, if any, might be such that necessarily a thing is Hesperus if and only if it satisfies that description, and I doubt the pure descriptivist does either … I suspect that there isn’t any purely qualitative property that Hesperus and necessarily nothing different from Hesperus has … I suspect that there isn’t even any purely qualitative property that Hesperus and only Hesperus has … [87] [Kripke] is distinguishing metaphysical possibility — which requires being the case at some possible world — from epistemic possibility, which does not … [88] Kripke’s solution to the puzzle about the necessity or otherwise of identity statements involving proper names does not depend on which expressions express metaphysical possibility and which expressions express epistemic possibility. The crucial point is that metaphysical impossibility is one thing and epistemic impossibility is something else: the rigidity of both terms in a (true) identity statement guarantees that its falsity is (at least weakly) metaphysically impossible, but not that its falsity is epistemically impossible. As Kripke sees it, the failure of Russell, or Marcus, or Quine to solve the puzzle under discussion is due to their failure to distinguish metaphysical impossibility and epistemic impossibility (a priori excludability). Once this distinction is drawn, we can agree with Russell and Marcus that the formal argument set out at the beginning of this section is sound, and agree with Quine that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are names and it is an empirical question whether or not they are names of the same thing … [90] Because all this is very persuasive, Kripke succeeded in making the necessary a posteriori almost uncontroversial.” Hughes, Ibidem, vii–87–88. [Italics added]

* “[80] The classical definition of ‘logical truth’ or the truth of thought given by St. Thomas is, ‘the conformity of thought with reality’ (conformitas intellectus cum re), wherein reality [objective ideation] is the measure of [subjective] thought and not thought the measure of reality. Hence, truth necessarily presupposes a subject knowing and an object known. The mark or criterion of truth must, therefore, be sought for, either in the subject knowing or in the object known. But should we seek for and profess to find it in the subject knowing or in ideas or thought, which are modifications of the knowing subject [subjective ideation], the inevitable consequence would be, that thought or ideas [subjective ideation] would then become the measure of reality, not reality the measure of thought or ideas. In other words, our thoughts would then be true because we clearly and distinctly think them true. But it is obvious that it does not follow that, just because we think that our thoughts or ideas are true, that they, therefore, measure up to the reality. We may have quite clear and distinct ideas to which no reality corresponds ... [142] Kant of Germany rejected, in turn, the English philosophy of Materialism, and inaugurated what is known to-day as German philosophy. In the hands of Kant’s disciple, Fichte, and, subsequently, of Shelling and Hegel, Kantianism quickly matured into Idealistic Pantheism, which is nothing more than [143] another form of advanced Atheism.” Michael Joseph Mahony (1860–1936), Cartesianism, New York, Fordham University Press, 1925, 80–142–143.

See: “Modern irrationalism, in order to validate pseudo–Hegelianism and anti–Hegelianism, squares the Lecture Notes and the great works published by Hegel in his lifetime: Pseudo–Hegelianism and anti–Hegelianism thus squares both Kant and Hegel in order to prove the speculative logical and dialectical system of the genuine Hegel’s philosophical science of Absolute Idealism is flawed. Irrationalism thus perverts the history of philosophy and modern Europe, especially that of the 20th century.” Christopher Richard Wade Dettling, Americanism: The New Hegelian Orthodoxy, San Francisco, The Medium Corporation, 2016.

Remarks: Mahony veers into modern irrationalism in his interpretation of German Idealism and modern European philosophy, yet is saved by Ultramontanism and Scholasticism upon the stage of 20th century world history in his conception of thought and reality: The Vatican’s Aristotle and Aquinas.

2. Kripke, Ibidem, 162–163.

See: “[154] If names are rigid designators, then there can be no question about identities being necessary, because ‘a’ and ‘b’ will be rigid designators of a certain man or thing x. Then even in every possible world, a and b will refer to this same object x, and to no other, and so there will be no situation in which a might not have been b. That would have to be a situation in which the object which we are also now calling ‘x’ would not have been identical with itself. Then one could not possibly have a situation in which Cicero would not have been Tully or Hesperus would not have been Phosphorus [13. I thus agree with Quine, that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is (or can be) an empirical discovery; with Marcus, that it is necessary. Both Quine and Marcus, according to the present standpoint, err in identifying the epistemological and the metaphysical issues]. Aside from the identification of necessity with a priority, what has made people feel the other way? There are two things which have made people feel the other way [14. The two confusions alleged, especially the second, are both related to the confusion of the metaphysical question of the necessity of ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ with the epistemological question of its a prioricity. For if Hesperus is identified by its position in the sky in the evening, and Phosphorus by its position in the morning, an investigator may well know, in advance of empirical research, that Hesperus is Phosphorus if and only if one and the same body occupies position x in the evening and position y in the morning. The a priori material equivalence of the two statements, however, does not imply their strict (necessary) equivalence. (The same remarks apply to the case of heat and molecular motion below.) Similar remarks apply to some extent to the relationship between ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ and “‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ name the same thing.” A confusion that also operates is, of course, the confusion between what we would say of a counterfactual situation and how people in that situation would have described it; this confusion, too, is probably related to the confusion between a prioricity and necessity].” Kripke, Ibidem, 154.

3. Kripke, Ibidem, 161.

4. Kripke, Ibidem, 163.

5. Kripke, Ibidem, 161–162.

6. Kripke, Ibidem, 162.

V/ Kripkean Epistemic Situations: Transcendental Epistemology

1. Saul Aaron Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Identity and Individuation, Milton Karl Munitz, editor, New York, New York University Press, 1971, 135–164; 154. [Italics added] See: “I thus agree with Quine, that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is (or can be) an empirical discovery; with Marcus, that it is necessary. Both Quine and Marcus, according to the present standpoint, err in identifying the epistemological and the metaphysical issues.”

2. Kripke, Ibidem.

3. Ibidem.

VI/ Hegel and Kant

1. Hegel, „Einleitung: Allgemeine Begriff der Logik,“ Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objective Logik: Die Lehre vom Seyn, Erster Band, Zweite Auflage, Stuttgart und Tübingen, in den J.F. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1832, 1–34; 1–25; 5–6–7. [1812]

See: “Reflective understanding took possession of philosophy. We must know exactly what is meant by this expression which moreover is often used as a slogan; in general it stands for the understanding as abstracting, and hence as separating and remaining fixed in its separations. Directed against reason, it behaves like ordinary common sense and imposes its view that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, meaning that it is sense perception which first gives them filling and reality and that reason left to its own resources engenders only figments of the brain. In this self–renunciation on the part of reason, the Notion of truth is lost; it is limited to knowing only subjective truth, only phenomena, appearances, only something to which the [46] nature of the object itself does not correspond: knowing has lapsed into opinion. However, this turn taken by cognition, which appears as a loss and retrograde step, is based on something more profound on which rests the elevation of reason into the loftier spirit of modern philosophy. The basis of that universally held conception is, namely, to be sought in the insight into the necessary conflict of the determinations of the understanding with themselves. The reflection already referred to is this, to transcend the concrete immediate object and to determine it and separate it. But equally it must transcend these its separating determinations and straightway connect them. It is at the stage of this connecting of the determinations that their conflict emerges. This connecting activity of reflection belongs in itself to reason and the rising above those determinations which attains to an insight into their conflict is the great negative step towards the true Notion of reason. But the insight, when not thorough–going, commits the mistake of thinking that it is reason which is in contradiction with itself; it does not recognize that the contradiction is precisely the rising of reason above the limitations of the understanding and the resolving of them. Cognition, instead of taking from this stage the final step into the heights, has fled from the unsatisfactoriness of the categories of the understanding to sensuous existence, imagining that in this it possesses what is solid and self–consistent. But on the other hand, since this knowledge is self–confessedly knowledge only of appearances, the unsatisfactoriness of the latter is admitted, but at the same time presupposed: As much as to say that admittedly, we have no proper knowledge of things–in–themselves but we do have a proper knowledge of them within the sphere of appearances, as if, so to speak, only the kind of objects were different, and one kind, namely things–in–themselves, did not fall within the scope of our knowledge but the other kind, phenomena, did.” Hegel, “Introduction: General Notion of Logic,” Hegel’s Science of Logic, Arnold Vincent Miller, translator & John Niemeyer Findlay, forward, New York, 1976, 43–64; 43–59; 45–46. [1969] See: Hegel, “Einleitung,” Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objektive Logik, Erster Band, Nürnberg, bey Johann Leonhard Schrag, 1812, i–xxviii; v–vii; Hegel, “Einleitung: Allgemeiner Begriff der Logik,” Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objektive Logik, Erster Band, Zweite Ausgabe, Stuttgard und Tübingen, J.F. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1832, 1–34; 1–25; 5–6. [1812]

Remarks: This is not our own translation, nor the translation of our associates, with whom we have regular institutional intercourse, which results in our personal financial gain. While we do not accept every semantic and syntactical choice of the translator, for our immediate purpose, the meaning is clear enough.

See also: “But the reflection of the understanding seized hold of philosophy. We must know exactly what is meant by this saying which is otherwise often used as a slogan. It refers in general to an understanding that abstracts and therefore separates, that remains fixed in its separations. Turned against reason, this understanding behaves in the manner of ordinary common sense, giving credence to the latter’s view that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, that is, that only sense perception gives filling and reality to them; that reason, in so far as it abides in and for itself, generates only mental figments. In this self–renunciation of reason, the concept of truth is lost, is restricted to the knowledge of mere subjective truth, of mere appearances, of only something to which the nature of the fact does not correspond; knowledge has lapsed into opinion. Yet there is something deeper lying at the foundation of this turn which knowledge takes, and appears as a loss and a retrograde step, something on which the elevation of reason to the loftier spirit of modern philosophy [26] in fact rests. The basis of that conception now universally accepted is to be sought, namely, in the insight into the necessary conflict of the determinations of the understanding with themselves. — The reflection already mentioned consists in transcending the concrete immediate, in determining and parting it. But this reflection must equally transcend its separating determinations and above all connect them. The conflict of determinations breaks out precisely at the point of connection. This reflective activity of connection belongs in itself to reason, and to rise above the determinations and attain insight into their discord is the great negative step on the way to the true concept of reason. But, when not carried through, this insight runs into the misconception that reason is the one that contradicts itself; it fails to see that the contradiction is in fact the elevation of reason above the restrictions of the understanding and the dissolution of them. At that point, instead of making the final step that would take it to the summit, knowledge flees from the unsatisfactoriness of the determinations of the understanding to sensuous existence, believing that there it will find stability and accord. On the other hand, since this cognition is self–admittedly a cognition only of appearances, the unsatisfactoriness of the latter is admitted but at the same time presupposed: As much as to say that although we do not have cognition of things in themselves, nevertheless, within the sphere of appearance we do have correct cognition; as if, so to speak, there were a difference only in the kind of subject matters and one kind, namely the things in themselves, does not fall within the scope of knowledge whereas the other kind, namely the appearances, does. This is like attributing right insight to someone, with the stipulation, however, that he is not fit to see what is true but only what is false. Absurd as this might be, no less absurd would be a cognition which is true but does not know its subject matter as it is in itself.” Hegel, “Introduction: General Concept of Logic,” The Science of Logic, George Di Giovanni, editor and translator & Michael Baur, general editor, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 23–43; 23–38; 25–26.

See finally: „Aber nachdem der gemeine Menschenverstand sich der Philosophie bemächtigte, hat er seine Ansichte geltend gemacht, daß die Wahrheit auf sinnlicher Realität beruhe, daß die Gedanken nur Gedanken seyen, in dem Sinne, daß erste die sinnliche Wahrnehmung ihnen Gehalt und Realität gebe, daß die Vernunft, insofern sie [vi] an und für sich bleibe, nur Hirngespinnste erzeuge. In diesem Verzichtthun der Vernunft aus sich selbst ist der Begriff der Wahrheit verlohren gegangen; sie hat sich darauf eingeschränkt, nur subjective Wahrheit, nur die Erscheinung zu erkennen, nur etwas, dem die Natur der Sache selbst nicht entspreche; das Wissen ist zur Meynung zurükgefalten. Allein diese Wendung, welche das Erkennen genommen hat, und die als Verlust und Rükschritt erscheint, hat das Liefere zum Grunde, worauf überhaupt die Erhebung der Vernunft in den höhern Geist der neueren Philosophie beruht. Der Grund jener allgemein gewordenen vorstellung ist nemlich in der Einsicht von dem nothwendigen Widerstreite der Bestimmungen des Verstands mit sich selbst, zu suchen. — Die reflexion geht über das concrete Unmittelbare hinaus, und trennt dasselbe bestimmend. Aber sie muß eben so sehr über diese ihre trennenden Bestimmungen hinausgehen, und sie zunächst beziehen. Auf dem Standpunkte dieses Beziehens tritt der Widerstreit derselben hervor. Dieses Beziehen der Reflexion gehört der vernunft an; die Erhebung über jene Bestimmungen, die zur Einsicht ihres Widerstreits gelangt, ist der große negative Schritt zum wahrhaften Begriffe der Vernunft. Aber die nicht durchgeführte Einsicht fällt in den Widerspruch eben das erheben der Vernunft über die Beschränkungen des Verstands und das Auflösen derselben ist. Statt von hier aus den letzten [vii] Schritt in die höhe zu thun, ist die Erkenntniß von dem Unbefriedigenden der Verstandesbestimmungen zu der sinnlichen Wirklichkeit zurükgeflohen, an derselben das Feste und Einige zu haben vermeinend. Indem aber auf der andern Seite diese Erkenntniß sich als die Erkenntniß nur von Erscheinendem weiß, wird das Unbefriedigende derselben eingestanden, aber zugleich vorausgesetzt, als obs zwar nicht die Dinge an sich, aber doch innerhalb der Sphäre der Erscheinung richtig erkannt würde, als ob dabei gleichsam nur die Art der erkannten Gegenstände verschieden wäre, und die eine Art, nemlich die Dinge an sich zwar nicht, aber doch die andere Art, nemlich die Erscheinungen in die Erkenntniß fielen. Wie wenn einem Manne richtige Einsicht beygemessen würde, mit dem Zusatz, daß er jedoch nichts Wahres, sondern nur Unwahres einzusehen fähig sey. So ungereimt das letztere wäre, so ungereimt ist eine wahre Erkenntniß, die den Gegenstand nicht erkännte, wie er an sich ist.“ Hegel, „Einleitung,“ Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objective Logik, Erster Band, Nürnberg, bey Johann Leonhard Schrag, 1812, i–xxviii; v–vi–vii.

2. Hegel, „Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse,“ Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse: Zum Gebrauch für seine Vorlesungen (Philosophische Bibliothek, Band 124), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel & Eduard Gans; mit den von Gans redigierten Zusätzen aus Hegels Vorlesungen neu herausgegeben von Georg Lasson, neue Ausgabe, Leipzig, Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1911, §§1–360; 1–279/§§358–360; 278–279. [1821]

See: “Mind and its world are thus both alike lost and plunged in the infinite grief … Mind is here pressed back upon itself in the extreme of its absolute negativity. This is the absolute turning point; mind rises out of this situation and grasps the infinite positivity of this its inward character, i.e., it grasps the principle of the unity of the divine nature and the human, the reconciliation of objective truth and freedom as the truth and freedom appearing within self–consciousness and subjectivity … The realm of fact has discarded its barbarity and unrighteous caprice, while the realm of truth has abandoned the world of beyond and its arbitrary force, so that the true reconciliation which discloses the state as the image and actuality of reason has become objective. In the state, self–consciousness finds in an organic development the actuality of its substantive knowing and willing; in religion, it finds the feeling and the representation of this its own truth as an ideal essentiality; while in philosophical science, it finds the free comprehension and knowledge of this truth as one and the same in its mutually complementary manifestations, i.e., in the state, in nature, and in the ideal world.” Hegel, “Part Three: Ethical Life,” The Philosophy of Right, Thomas Malcolm Knox, translator, §§358–360.

See also: See: „§358. (4) Das germanische Reich. Aus diesem Verluste seiner selbst und seiner Welt und dem unendlichen Schmerz desselben, als dessen Volk das israelitische bereit gehalten war, erfaßt der in sich zurückgedrängte Geist in dem Extreme seiner absoluten Negativität, dem an und für sich seienden Wendepunkt, die unendliche Positivität dieses seines Innern, das Prinzip der Einheit der göttlichen und menschlichen Natur, die Versöhnung als der innerhalb des Selbstbewußtseins und der Subjektivität erschienenen objektiven Wahrheit und Freiheit, welche dem nordischen Prinzip der germanischen Völker zu vollführen übertragen wird. §359. Die Innerlichkeit des Prinzips, als die noch abstrakte, in Empfindung als Glauben, Liebe und Hoffnung existierende, Versöhnung und Lösung alles Gegensatzes, entfaltet ihren Inhalt, ihn zur Wirklichkeit und selbstbewußten Vernünftigkeit zu erheben, zu einem vom Gemüte, der Treue und Genossenschaft Freier ausgehenden weltlichen Reiche, das in dieser seiner Subjektivität ebenso ein Reich der für sich seienden rohen Willkür und der Barbarei der Sitten ist — gegenüber einer jenseitigen Welt, einem intellektuellen Reiche, dessen Inhalt wohl jene Wahrheit seines Geistes, aber als noch ungedacht in die Barbarei der Vorstellung gehüllt ist, und, als geistige Macht über das wirkliche Gemüt, sich als eine unfreie fürchterliche Gewalt gegen dasselbe verhält. §360. Indem — in dem harten Kampfe dieser im Unterschiede, der hier seine absolute Entgegensetzung gewonnen, stehenden [279] und zugleich in einer Einheit und Idee wurzelnden Reiche, — das Geistliche die Existenz seines Himmels zum irdischen Diesseits und zur gemeinen Weltlichkeit, in der Wirklichkeit und in der Vorstellung, degradiert, das Weltliche dagegen sein abstraktes Fürsichsein zum Gedanken und dem Prinzipe vernünftigen Seins und Wissens, zur Vernünftigkeit des Rechts und Gesetzes hinaufbildet, ist an sich der Gegensatz zur marklosen Gestalt geschwunden; die Gegenwart hat ihre Barbarei und unrechtliche Willkür, und die Wahrheit hat ihr Jenseits und ihre zufällige Gewalt abgestreift, so daß die wahrhafte Versöhnung objektiv geworden, welche den Staat zum Bilde und zur Wirklichkeit der Vernunft entfaltet, worin das Selbstbewußtsein die Wirklichkeit seines substantiellen Wissens und Wollens in organischer Entwickelung, wie in der Religion das Gefühl und die Vorstellung dieser seiner Wahrheit als idealer Wesenheit, in der Wissenschaft aber die freie begriffene Erkenntnis dieser Wahrheit als einer und derselben in ihren sich ergänzenden Manifestationen, dem Staate, der Natur und der ideellen Welt, findet.“ Hegel, „Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse,“ Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse: Zum Gebrauch für seine Vorlesungen (Philosophische Bibliothek, Band 124), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel & Eduard Gans; mit den von Gans redigierten Zusätzen aus Hegels Vorlesungen neu herausgegeben von Georg Lasson, neue Ausgabe, Leipzig, Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1911, §§1–360; 1–279/§§358–360; 278–279.

See also: Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Zum Gebrauch für seine Vorlesungen, Berlin, Nicolaische Buchhandlung, 1821; Hegel, Philosophische Bibliothek: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, mit den von Gans redigierten Zusätzen aus Hegels Vorlesungen, Neu herausgegeben von Georg Lasson, Band 124, Leipzig, Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1911; Hegel, Philosophische Bibliothek: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, mit Hegels eigenhändigen Randbemerkungen in seinem Handexemplar der Rechtsphilosophie, Vierte Auflage, Band 124a, Johannes Hoffmeister, Herausgegeber, Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag 1967. [1955]

3. Carl Prantl, „I. Kritische Betrachtung,“ Die Bedeutung der Logik für den jetzigen Standpunkt der Philosophie, München, Christian Kaiser, 1849, 1–118; 3–4.

See: „[47] Im Inneren gieng die Verwandlung des Hegelianismus dadurch vor sich, dass in Folge der Prätension der Hegel’schen Logik die ewige Wahrheit, welche die Entwicklung des Absoluten ist, in die Zeitwahrheit, und der Pantheismus in einen Pananthropismus transformirt wurde, und flugs waren die Kategorien weggeworfen und die Anhänger der letzteren als Althegelianer stigmatisirt, nur Eine Kategorie wurde belassen, die der Entwicklung als Grundkategorie aller abstracten Philosophie, und nunmehr sah man als die That der Jahre 1844–1847 das Auftreten des historischen Strebens gegen das der Begriffswelt bezeichnen. So war in dieser lange schon glimmenden Spaltung die Logik bereits aufgegeben, und die Polemik zog sich in andere Sphären; unsäglich aber ist es, welch Chaos der Ansichten durch E. Bauer [Edgar Bauer 1820–1886], B. Bauer [Bruno Bauer 1809–1882], Wilke [Christian Gottlob Wilke 1788–1854], Taillandier [René Gaspard Ernest Taillandier (Saint–René Taillandier) 1817–1879], Nauwerk [Karl Gottlieb Ludwig Nauwerck (Nauwerk) 1810–1891], Jellineck [Herrmann Jellinek (Jellineck) 1822–1848], Frank [Franz Hermann Reinhold von Frank 1827–1894] (die Epigonen), Hess [Moses Hess 1812–1877], A. Ruge [Arnold Ruge 1802–1880], Max Stirner [Johann Kaspar Schmidt 1806–1856] („der Einzige und sein Eigenthum“) entstand und in den einzelnen Gliedern sich gegenseitig wieder bekämpfte. Gegen dieses im Momente der Gegenwart aufgehende „historische“ Streben suchte ein Theil der sogenannten Althegelianer besonders das Theologische [48] zu retten sowie ja auch Hegel selbst (in der Religionsphilosophie) die Dogmen hatte erhalten und begeistigen wollen, während auf der anderen Seite Strauss [David Friedrich Strauss 1808–1874] annahm, dass im geschichtlichen Processe die Dogmen am Fortschritte der Philosophie sich abreiben, sowie schon dass der Geist auch in der Form endlicher Subjectivität Ursache der Natur sei. Durch diess letztere war nun wohl für das Hegel’sche „Entlassen“ ein realer Boden gewonnen, aber das Ganze der Philosophie auf eine Nadelspitze gestellt, so dass bei weiter folgender Bewegung nur entweder die Idealität absolut verloren gehen, oder andrerseits mit einer kühnen Wendung in der Realität selbst ergriffen werden konnte. Das erstere geschah durch die alleräusserste Linke, das letztere durch Feuerbach. Die extremste Linke brachte den vollsten Pananthropismus und eine Durchführung der Egoität, welche in M. Stirner’s „der Einzige und sein Eigenthum“ wohl den möglichsten Culminationspunkt erreicht hat, an welchen sich Communismus, Socialismus, Fourierismus, St. Simonismus anlehnen können. [49] Da wurde nun einerseits aus dem Hegel’schen Entrücken des Geistes über die Natur nicht mit Unrecht die Stellung der Rechtsphilosophie und der „Conservatismus“ Hegel’s abgeleitet, und andrerseits bemerkt, der Hegel’sche Pantheismus sei doch nur eine auf dem Standpunkte der Theologie ver harrende Negation der Theologie.“ Carl Prantl, „I. Kritische Betrachtung IV: Die Hegelianer,“ Die Bedeutung der Logik für den jetzigen Standpunkt der Philosophie, München, Christian Kaiser, 1849, 1–118; 44–52; 47–49.

VII/ Kripkean Transzendentalphilosophie

1. Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970),” Ibidem, 253–355; 253–284; 260–261–263. [1970]

2. Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918): VIII. Excursus Into Metaphysics: What There Is,” Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, Robert Charles Marsh, editor, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1956, 175–281; 269–281; 277: “We shall not deny that there may be a metaphysical ego. We shall merely say that it is a question that does not concern us in any way, because it is a matter about which we know nothing and can know nothing, and therefore it obviously cannot be a thing that comes into science in any way. What we know is this string of experiences that makes up a person, and that is put together by means of certain empirically given relations, such, e.g., as memory.” [Italics added]

See: “The above argument, it may be urged, has overlooked a possibility. It has used a transcendental argument, so an opponent may contend, without sufficiently proving that knowledge about externality must be possible without reference to the matters external to each other. The definition of a position may be impossible, so long as we neglect the matter which fills the form, but may become possible when this matter is taken into account. Such an objection can, I think, be successfully met, by a reference to the passivity and homogeneity of our form. For any dependence of the definition of a position on the particular matter filling that position, would involve some kind of interaction between the matter and its position, some effect of the diverse content on the homogeneous form. But since the form is totally destitute of thinghood, perfectly impassive, and perfectly void of differences between its parts, any such effect is inconceivable.” Bertrand Russell, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1897, 140.

VIII/ Saul Kripke and Bertrand Russell

1. Saul Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Identity and Individuation, Milton Karl Munitz, editor, New York, New York University Press, 1971, 135–164; 139–140.

2. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970),” Ibidem, 253–355; 253–284; 261.

3. Hegel, „Einleitung: Allgemeine Eintheilung der Logik,“ Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objective Logik: Die Lehre vom Seyn, Erster Band, Zweite Auflage, Stuttgart und Tübingen, in der J.F. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1832, 1–34; 26–34; 29–30. [1812]

See: „Ich erinnere, daß ich auf die Kantische Philosophie in diesem Werke darum häufig Rücksicht nehme, (was manchen überflüssig scheinen könnte) weil sie, — ihre nähere Bestimmtheit sowie die Besonderen Theile der Ausführung mögen sonst und auch in diesem Werke betrachtet werden, wie sie wollen, — die Grundlage und den Ausgangspunkt der neueren Philosophie ausmachte, und diß ihr Verdienst durch das, was an ihr ausgesetzt werden möge, ihr ungeschmälert bleibt. Auch darum ist auf sie in der objectiven Logik wenigstens häufig Rücksicht zu nehmen, weil sie sich auf wichtig bestimmtere Seiten des Logischen naher einläßt, spätere Darstellungen der Philosophie hingegen dasselbe wenig beachtet, zum Theil oft nur eine rohe, — aber nicht ungerechte — , Verachtung dagegen bewiesen haben.“ Hegel, „Logik: Über die allgemeine Eintheilung derselben,“ Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objective Logik, Erster Band, Nürnberg, bey Johann Leonhard Schrag, 1812, 1–5; 2.

IX/ Conclusion

1. Christopher Hughes, Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004, 8: “How do I know that my own intuitions aren’t corrupted by exposure to Kripke, Putnam, et alii? I’m not sure, but I take comfort from the fact that if I am blind to a certain reading of (2), my form of blindness is very widespread.”

Remarks: Alas, Christopher Hughes never elaborates upon how exactly he intuits the “fact” that his form of blindness is widespread, since in his book on Kripke he never precisely elucidates what he means by “intuition,” nor why exactly he means it. Most of the “philosophers” that I ever knew at government universities, public academic institutions and national educational authorities (under the thumbs of corrupt politicians and their partisans), in my humble opinion, were very lazy people. They usually write, if they write at all, for a very small coterie of sycophants, with the aim of advancing the political and economic careers of themselves and their masters. Of course, I have encountered some rare exceptions.

2. See: “For much of the first half of the twentieth century modality had a somewhat marginal place in analytic philosophy. Kripke contributed more to its ‘demarginalization’ than any other analytic philosopher. He did this by providing a semantics for modal logic (or rather, for a family of (propositional and quantified) modal logics); by vigorously and effectively addressing Quinean worries about whether quantification into modal contexts made sense; and by bringing modal issues into various central debates in philosophy. We have already seen an instance of this in Kripke’s account of names; we shall see another in his treatment of the mind–body problem. The ‘remodalization’ of metaphysics and the philosophy of language may retrospectively come to be thought of as Kripke’s most important contribution to twentieth–century philosophy. Those of us who, as undergraduates, learned philosophy from Quineans think of Kripke as a philosopher who (almost single–handedly) transformed the philosophical landscape.” Christopher Hughes, Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004, 84.

Remarks: For the modern sophists, following in the footsteps of Transzendentale Logik, language is nothing more than an ensemble of linguistic phantasms which they “name” as the Philosophy of Language, i.e.,they phantasize that their etymological delusions form a systematic (logical) grammar, a language rather than a hodgepodge of contradictions and a useless catalog of endless hairsplitting: Instead of conceptions and notions, empirical and rational, the modern sophists prefer the views, perspectives and standpoints (imaginings, i.e., intuitions, beliefs, even self–consciousness) of the Kantian traditions, albeit served upon a golden platter of “linguistic philosophy,” which their masters deploy in the arena of politics and economics with self–destructive intensity, — following in the world historical footsteps of modern European political and economic irrationalism.

See also: “For Kant, the Enlightenment is the development of reason; it is the development of each man’s understanding … Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment as man’s emergence from immaturity defines historical movement by its progression from one phase — a lesser phase — to a new higher phase and implied in this is the concept of teleology.” Christopher Hughes, “Introduction: Enlightenment Theory/The Concepts of History and History,” Liberal Democracy as the End of History: Fukuyama and Postmodern Challenges, New York, Routledge, 2012. [Italics added]

See also: “Philosophers … tend to argue that history can end, i.e., they argue there is a deep universal force driving history; and that history is driven towards the realization of this geist. This position is perfectly exemplified by Kant, for whom history was an evolutionary process whereby the intelligent and instinctive sides of man become reconciled and conflict between body and mind becomes civilized. Thus, for Kant, the end point of history is when man is sufficiently prudent and rational to overcome the shortcomings of his instinctual nature. Kant does not argue that man has, or ever will, achieve this, but he argues that history has direction and is programmed by a geist, and that history is a process which is seeking to realise the geist; thus, Kant argues, we can write history, because there is an end point.” Ibidem.

See finally: Claus Dieter Kernig (1927–2019), editor, Marxism, Communism and Western Society: A Comparative Encyclopedia, 8 vols., New York, Herder & Herder, 1972; Perry Andersen, Considerations on Western Marxism, London, England, New Left Books, 1976; Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012), The Age of Revolution, 1962; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1994.

3. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, New York, Vintage Books, 2004, 3–107–108. [2002]

Epilogue

1. Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity (1972),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, 255–270.

2. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lectures I–III (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970),” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, Donald Herbert Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka , Gabriel Nuchelmans & Wesley Charles Salmon, series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda, Laurence Jonathan Cohen, Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore, Jerry Alan Fodor, Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach, Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley, Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker, Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972, 253–355; 295–296. [1970]

3. Paul W. Humphreys & James H. Fetzer, editors, “Notes,” The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins, John P. Burgess, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Sten Lindström, Quentin Smith & Scott Soames, contributors, Dordrecht/Boston/London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, xii–xiii; xii.

4. Kripke, Ibidem, 1972, 308.

5. Kripke, Ibidem, 1996, 268. [Italics added]

6. Kripke, Ibidem, 1972, 304.

7. Kripke, Ibidem, 1996, 267.

8. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lectures I–III (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970),” Ibidem, 260–260–264.

9. The methodological doctrine of reference (Kripkean Transzendentale Logik) which is found in the 1972 and 1980 editions of Naming and Necessity: “It’s certainly a philosophical thesis, and not a matter of obvious definitional equivalence, either that everything a priori is necessary or that everything necessary is a priori. Both concepts may be vague. That may be another problem. But at any rate they are dealing with two different domains, two different areas, the epistemological and the metaphysical … [263] necessary a posteriori truths, and probably contingent a priori truths, both exist.” Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970),” Ibidem, 253–355; 253–284; 261–263. [1970]

10. Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980), Minneapolis, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 3–18; 3–4. [1972+1982]; Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” The Journal of Philosophy, 69.19(26 October 1972): 649–665.

See: “If Hegel … had been led to talk more about social needs and less about Absolute Knowledge, Western philosophy might … have saved itself a century of nervous shuffles.” Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, London, England, Penguin Books, 1999, 71.

See finally: “We can only explain what ‘philosophical thinking about experience’ is by reference to the sort of thing which Kant did.” Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, Massachusetts, Princeton University Press, 1980, 150.

Remarks: Kripke, Rorty and Chomsky: The struggle between Kantian anti–Hegelianism and Kantio–Hegelianism, as the supremacy of Hegelian anti–Kantianism within the American world, as the twentieth century clash between Kant and Hegel, i.e., as the universal historical matrix of the dynamism of history’s phasality itself.

This excerpt from “Kripke’s Logic” is part of a chapter in a much larger work of mine, Gravediggers of Modernity, wherein the collapse of European modernity and rise of Globalism is conceptualized world historically, i.e., as the conceptual basis of the Digital revolution: The world historical rationality of Americanism is conceptualized anti–Copericanly, i.e., following in the pure Hegelian footsteps of the rational Hegelianism of the speculative and logical system of the genuine Hegel’s philosophical science of absolute idealism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

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Gérard Debreu, “Preface,” Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium (Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University), (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1971), ix–xi. [1959]

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Einleitung: Allgemeiner Begriff der Logik,” Wissenschaft der Logik: Die objektive Logik, Erster Band, Zweite Ausgabe, (Stuttgart und Tübingen: J.F. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1832), 1–34; 1–25; 5–6. [1812]

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Introduction: General Notion of Logic,” Hegel’s Science of Logic, Arnold Vincent Miller, translator & John Niemeyer Findlay, forward, (New York: The Humanities Press, 1976), 43–64; 43–59. [1969]

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Introduction: General Concept of Logic,” The Science of Logic, George Di Giovanni, editor and translator & Michael Baur, general editor, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 23–43; 23–38.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: Zwei Bände in einem Band Ungekürzte Ausgabe, 851–855 Auflage, (München: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H., 1943).

Christopher Hughes, Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, 2004).

Paul W. Humphreys & James H. Fetzer, editors, The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins, John P. Burgess, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Sten Lindström, Quentin Smith & Scott Soames, contributors, (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998).

Paul W. Humphreys & James H. Fetzer, editors, “Introduction,” The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins, John P. Burgess, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Sten Lindström, Quentin Smith & Scott Soames, contributors, (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), vii–xi.

Herrmann Jellinek (Jellineck), “Über die Bedeutung der letzten zwölf Jahre in Deutschland,” Die Geganwärtige Krisis der hegel’schen Philosophie, mit einer kritischen Einleitung über die Bedeutung der letzten Zwölf Jahre in Deutschland von H. Jellinek, René Gaspard Ernest Taillandier (St. Réné Taillandier), (Leipzig: Verlag von E.O. Weller, 1847), 3–34.

Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

Immanuel Kant, “Introduction: VII. — Idea and Division of a Particular Science, Under the Name of a Critique of Pure Reason,” Critique of Pure Reason, revised edition, John M. Dow Meiklejohn, translator, introduction & Brandt V.B. Dixon, special introduction, (New York: The Colonial Press, 1900), 1–18; 15–18.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Identity and Individuation, Milton Karl Munitz, editor, (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 135–164.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lectures I–III (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970),” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, Donald Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka (1929–2015),Gabriel Nuchelmans (1922–1996) & Wesley Charles Salmon (1925–2001),series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda (1924–1991), Laurence Jonathan Cohen (1923–2006), Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore (1929–2014), Jerry Alan Fodor (1935–2017), Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach (1916–2013), Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley (1938–1999), Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker (1940–?), Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, (Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972), 253–355. [1970]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970),” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, Donald Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Gabriel Nuchelmans & Wesley Charles Salmon, series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda, Laurence Jonathan Cohen, Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore, Jerry Alan Fodor, Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach, Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley, Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker, Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, (Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972), 253–355; 253–284. [1970]

Saul Aaron Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Basil Blackwell, 1982).

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity (1972),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius P. Martinich, editor, (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 255–270. [1985+1990]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “On Rules and Private Language (1982),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 524–537. [1985+1990]

Frederick W. Kroon, “Kant and Kripke on the Identifiability of Modal and Epistemic Notions,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 19.1(1981): 49–60.

Michael Polanyi & Harry Prosch, Meaning, (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

Carl Prantl, „I. Kritische Betrachtung,“ Die Bedeutung der Logik für den jetzigen Standpunkt der Philosophie, (München: Christian Kaiser, 1849), 1–118.

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Willard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 39–52. [1985+1990]

Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” The Journal of Philosophy, 69.19(26 October 1972): 649–665.

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Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, (London, England: Penguin Books, 1999).

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Przemyslaw Tacik, “On the Kantian Answer to ‘Kripkenstein’s’ Rule–Following Paradox,” Problems of Normativity, Rules and Rule–Following, Michał Araszkiewicz, Paweł Banaś, Tomasz Gizbert–Studnicki & Krzysztof Płeszka, editors, (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2015), 67–82.

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KRIPKE: SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (Primary Sources)

Saul Aaron Kripke, “A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24.1(March, 1959): 1–14.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Distinguished Constituents (abstract),” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24.4(December, 1959): 323.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic (abstract),” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24.4(December, 1959): 323–324.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “The Problem of Entailment (abstract),” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24.4(December, 1959): 324.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “‘Flexible’ Predicates of Formal Number Theory,” Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 13.4(August, 1962): 647–650.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “The Undecidability of Monadic Modal Quantification Theory,” Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik, 8(1962): 113–116.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic I: Normal Propositional Calculi,” Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik, 9(1963): 67–96.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,” Acta Philosophica Fennica, 16(1963): 83–94.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Semantical Analysis of Intuitionistic Logic I,” Formal Systems and Recursive Functions: Proceedings of the Eighth Logic Colloquium Oxford July 1963, John Newsome Crossley & Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett, editors, (Amsterdam: North–Holland Publishing Company, 1963), 92–130.

Saul Aaron Kripke, Dagfinn Føllesdal (1932–?), Ruth Barcan Marcus (1921–2012), John McCarthy (1927–2011) & Willard Van Orman Quine, contributors, “Discussion,” Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1961–1962: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1, Marx William Wartofsky, editor, (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1963),105–116.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Transfinite Recursions on Admissible Ordinals, I (abstract),” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 29.3(September, 1964): 161–162.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Transfinite Recursions on Admissible Ordinals, II (abstract),” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 29.3(September, 1964): 162.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Admissible Ordinals and the Analytic Hierarchy (abstract),” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 29.3(September, 1964): 163.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic II: Non–normal Modal Propositional Calculi,” The Theory of Models: Proceedings of the 1963 International Symposium at Berkeley, John West Addison Jr., Leon Albert Henkin & Alfred Tarski, editors, (Amsterdam, Holland: North–Holland Publishing Company, 1965), 206–220.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “An Extension of a Theorem of Gaifman–Hales–Solovay,” Fundamenta Mathematicae, 61(1967): 29–32.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Identity and Individuation, Milton Karl Munitz, editor, (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 135–164.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,” Reference and Modality: Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Leonard Linsky, editor, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 63–72.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lectures I–III (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd and 29th, 1970),” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, Donald Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka (1929–2015), Gabriel Nuchelmans (1922–1996) & Wesley Charles Salmon (1925–2001), series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda (1924–1991), Laurence Jonathan Cohen (1923–2006), Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore (1929–2014), Jerry Alan Fodor (1935–2017), Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach (1916–2013), Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley (1938–1999), Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker (1940–?), Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, (Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972), 253–355. [1970]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970),” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, Donald Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Gabriel Nuchelmans & Wesley Charles Salmon, series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda, Laurence Jonathan Cohen, Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore, Jerry Alan Fodor, Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach, Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley, Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker, Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, (Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972), 253–355; 253–284. [1970]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Addenda to Saul A. Kripke’s Paper ‘Naming and Necessity,’” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, Donald Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Gabriel Nuchelmans & Wesley Charles Salmon, series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda, Laurence Jonathan Cohen, Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore, Jerry Alan Fodor, Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach, Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley, Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker, Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, (Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972), 763–769. [1970]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lectures I–III (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd and 29th, 1970),” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, 2nd edition, Donald Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Gabriel Nuchelmans & Wesley Charles Salmon, series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda, Laurence Jonathan Cohen, Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore, Jerry Alan Fodor, Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach, Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley, Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker, Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, (Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972), 253–355. [1970+1972]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity: Lecture I (Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium, January 20th, 22nd and 29th, 1970),” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, 2nd edition, Donald Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Gabriel Nuchelmans & Wesley Charles Salmon, series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda, Laurence Jonathan Cohen,Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore, Jerry Alan Fodor, Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach, Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley, Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker,Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, (Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972), 253–355; 253–284. [1970+1972]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Addenda to Saul A. Kripke’s Paper ‘Naming and Necessity,’” Semantics of Natural Language (Synthese Library: Monographs on Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science and of Knowledge, and on the Mathematical Methods of Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol. 40, 2nd edition, Donald Herbert Davidson & Gilbert Harman, editors; Donald Herbert Davidson, Jaakko Hintikka, Gabriel Nuchelmans & Wesley Charles Salmon, series editors; Hector–Neri Castañeda, Laurence Jonathan Cohen, Keith Sedgwick Donnellan, Charles J. Fillmore, Jerry Alan Fodor, Bas C. Van Fraassen, Peter Thomas Geach, Gilbert Harman, Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Aaron Kripke, George Lakoff, David Lewis, Leonard Linsky, Avishai Margalit, James David McCawley, Richard Montague, Terence Parsons, Barbara Hall Partee, Willard Van Orman Quine, John Robert Ross, Dana Scott, Robert C. Stalnaker, Peter Frederick Strawson, Patrick Suppes, John Wallace & Paul Ziff, contributors, (Dordrecht, Holland/Boston, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1972), 763–769. [1970+1972]

Saul Aaron Kripke, Naming and Necessity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972). [1970+1972]

Saul Aaron Kripke, Empty Reference: Shearman Lectures (Notes Taken by Ian Hacking, Jane Heale [Jane Heal] & Thomas Baldwin), (University of London, 1973).

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” The Journal of Philosophy, 72.19(November, 1975): 690–716.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “A Theory of Truth (I): Preliminary Report,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 41.2(1976): 556.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “A Theory of Truth (II): Preliminary Report,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 41.2(1976): 556–557.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Is There a Problem About Substitutional Quantification?” Truth and Meaning, Gareth Evans & John McDowell, editors, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1976), 324–419.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2(1977): 255–276.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Naming, Necessity and Natural Kinds, Stephen P. Schwartz, editor, (Ithaca, New York/London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 66–101.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,” Reference and Modality, Leonard Linsky, editor, (1977), ?

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference,” Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr. & Howard K. Wettstein, editors, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 6–27.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “A Puzzle About Belief,” Meaning and Use, Avishai Margalit, editor, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), 239–283.

Saul Aaron Kripke, Naming and Necessity, revised edition & new preface, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980). [1970+1972]

Saul Aaron Kripke, Naming and Necessity, revised edition & new preface, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Basil Blackwell, 1980). [1970+1972]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “New Preface,” Naming and Necessity, revised edition & new introduction, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Basil Blackwell, 1980), ? [1970+1972]

Saul Aaron Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition, (Oxford, Oxfordshire/Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell/Harvard University Press, 1982).

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Preface,” Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Basil Blackwell, 1982), vii–x.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “A Problem in the Theory of Reference: The Linguistic Division of Labor and the Social Character of Naming,” Philosophy and Culture: Proceedings of the XVIIth World Congress of Philosophy, (Montréal, Québec: Editions du Beffroi/Editions Montmorency, 1986), 241–247.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Chapter 10: Naming and Necessity (Lecture I–II),” Basic Topics in the Philosophy of Language, Robert M. Harnish & Harvester Wheatsheaf, editors, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice–Hall, 1993),192–220.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity (1972),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, (Oxford, Oxfordshire/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 255–270. [1985+1990]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “A Puzzle About Belief (1979),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, (Oxford, Oxfordshire/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 382–409. [1985+1990]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “On Rules and Private Language (1982),” The Philosophy of Language, 3rd edition, Aloysius Patrick Martinich, editor, (Oxford, Oxfordshire/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 524–537. [1985+1990]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Russell’s Notion of Scope,” Mind, 114(2005): 1005–1037.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Naming and Necessity (Lecture II),” Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics, Susana Nuccetelli & Gary Seay, editors, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 128–146.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference: Some Exegetical Notes,” Theoria, 74(2008): 181–218.

Saul Aaron Kripke, Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–26.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “On Two Paradoxes of Knowledge,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011),27–51.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52–74.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75–98.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99–124.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “A Puzzle About Belief,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 125–161.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Russell’s Notion of Scope,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 225–253.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “The First Person,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 292–321.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Unrestricted Exportation and Some Morals for the Philosophy of Language,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 322–350.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference: Some Exegetical Notes,” Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, vol. 1, (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2011), 254–291.

Saul Aaron Kripke, Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). [1973]

Saul Aaron Kripke, “The Church–Turing ‘Thesis’ as a Special Corollary of Gödel’s Completeness Theorem,” Computability: Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond, Jack Copeland, Carl J. Posy & Oron Shagrir, editors, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2013), 77–104.

Saul Aaron Kripke, “The Road to Gödel,” Naming, Necessity and More:Explorations in the Philosophical Work of Saul Kripke, Jonathan Berg, editor; Gilead Bar–Elli, Hanoch Ben–Yami, Meir Buzaglo, Eli Dresner, Paul Horwich, Saul Aaron Kripke, Teresa Robertson, Nathan Salmon, Oron Shagrir, Mark Steiner, contributors, (Cham, Switzerland: Springer/Basingstoke, United Kingdom & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 223–242.

©2019–2024 Christopher Richard Wade Dettling, Kripke’s Logic: 𝔗𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔰𝔷𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔫𝔱𝔞𝔩𝔢 𝔏𝔬𝔤𝔦𝔨. Second Edition. All rights reserved. This work is only for SUBSTACK and the SUBSTACK CORPORATION and its users: Users are not permitted to mount this writing on any network servers. No part of this writing may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the author, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web.

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