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The aim of this Topics Seminar is for the participating student (1) to gain a thorough understanding of the primary texts for the course and a familiarity with the current debates in the philosophical literature on this topic; (2) to appreciate the arguments for and against the positions; and (3) to develop an independent judgment about the most promising approach in this area.
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This “Topics Seminar” explores in depth issues and texts in the area of the philosophy of language and and philosophy of logic.
Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980) marks a watershed in contemporary analytic philosophy. Current analytic philosophy presupposes thorough familiarity with the topics, arguments and examples found in N&N and a handful of papers published before and shortly after. The topics include both semantics (especially proper names versus definite descriptions, and the causal reference theory), metaphysics (especially the thesis of necessity of origin concerning what a given object or type of object might possibly have been and might possibly become), and logic (especially as regards different notions of modality, i.e. possibility and necessity, and their interplay). This course is based around a close reading of N&N, accompanied by a few papers by Kripke and some secondary literature.
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