Kripke, Eucken and Lazarus: three ways a name gets hold of a thing
Saul Kripke died on 15 September 2022, aged 81. Rudolf Eucken, the 1908 Nobel literature laureate, died on this day in 1926 and was forgotten within a generation. Moritz Lazarus, who defined a people as those who count each other as one, was born on this day in 1824.
Saul Kripke died on 15 September 2022 at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in Plainsboro, New Jersey, of pancreatic cancer. He was 81. Sam Roberts's obituary ran in the New York Times nine days later; the CUNY Graduate Center, where Kripke had been a distinguished professor since 2003, called him a towering figure in analytic philosophy, which for once was not courtesy.
Two other anniversaries fall on the date, and neither is of that magnitude. Rudolf Eucken, who held the chair of philosophy at Jena from 1874 to 1920 and won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature, died in that city on 15 September 1926. Moritz Lazarus, who with his brother-in-law Heymann Steinthal founded a discipline since quietly taken apart, was born at Filehne in the Prussian province of Posen on 15 September 1824.
A thread runs through the three, and it is worth stating so that it can be tested. Kripke asked how a proper name reaches its bearer when the speaker knows almost nothing about him. Lazarus asked whether a collective noun — "a people" — names anything at all, and gave an answer that has aged strangely. Eucken supplies the third case only by a pun, his being a name once fastened to something and now to nothing anyone reads. Two of those are the same question; the third is a joke about the first two, and I shall not pretend otherwise.
The lectures were delivered without notes, and the transcript became the book#
Kripke was born in Bay Shore, Long Island, on 13 November 1940 and grew up in Omaha, where his father was a rabbi. Harvard's mathematics department wrote hoping he would apply for a post while he was still at school; Charles McGrath, profiling him for the New York Times on 28 January 2006, recorded the reply, that his mother had said he should finish high school and go to college first. The paper that prompted the letter, "A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic", ran in the Journal of Symbolic Logic for March 1959. He had written it at seventeen.
What it supplied was a model theory for modal logic. C. I. Lewis had built axiom systems for necessity and possibility; nobody could say what the axioms were true of. Take a set of points with an accessibility relation between them, read necessity as truth at every accessible point, and the rival modal systems fall out as different classes of frames. The Rolf Schock Prize citation of 2001 called it "the modal-logical semantics that bear his name".
The lectures came eleven years later. Kripke gave three of them to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium on 20, 22 and 29 January 1970, without notes, each running to about two hours. Margie Borschke's media history of the book reconstructs what followed: Princeton put a research assistant on the tape recorder, the tapes were transcribed verbatim, and the transcript went round the profession in photocopy before it went near a publisher. It reached print in 1972 in , edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, and became a Harvard book in 1980, the oral cadence surviving the editing. Readers who open expecting a treatise find a man thinking in front of an audience, qualifying, doubling back, breaking off to say he has no general theory.
Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Charles Taylor, Scott J. Shapiro, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Alexy
Prising the necessary apart from the a priori was the century's most consequential move in metaphysics#
On the descriptivist theory of Frege and Russell, refined into a cluster version by Searle and others, a proper name works as an abbreviated description, or a bundle of them: "Aristotle" means something like the pupil of Plato who taught Alexander, and picks out whoever satisfies enough of the bundle. The modal objection did the structural work. A rigid designator designates the same object in every possible world in which that object exists; names behave that way and descriptions do not. Had Aristotle gone into the family trade at twenty he would still have been Aristotle and not the pupil of Plato who taught Alexander, so the two cannot be saying the same thing.
The other objection, set out here in our account of Michael Devitt's work on reference, is the Gödel case: if the incompleteness proof was really Schmidt's and Gödel took it, almost everyone's only description of "Gödel" is satisfied by Schmidt, and we still do not talk about Schmidt.
Then the payoff, which is what makes this a metaphysics book. Kant had bolted two distinctions together, the necessary going with the a priori and the contingent with the a posteriori; Kripke unbolted them and produced traffic in both directions. Some necessary truths are discoverable only by experiment: "Hesperus is Phosphorus" was an astronomical finding, but both names rigidly designate Venus, so if the identity holds at all it holds in every world in which Venus exists. The same goes for water and H₂O. Some contingent truths are knowable a priori: stipulate that "one metre" shall be the length of stick S in Paris at time t₀ and you know without measuring anything that S is one metre long at t₀, though heat the bar and it would have been longer.
Its effect is easy to overstate, so it is worth being exact. Kripke established that necessity is a question about how the world is and apriority a question about how we can come to know, and that the two can be asked separately. That removed the main structural reason for treating metaphysics as disguised grammar, and nothing in analytic metaphysics after 1970 is untouched by it. It did not refute the positivists, most of whom had moved on or died, and it did not by itself restore the subject: that took twenty more years of work by people including David Lewis and Kit Fine, whose recent recognition marks the distance travelled. A standing objection is that the arguments run on intuitions about imagined cases, which Kripke knew and did not mind.
The positive account is the causal-historical one, offered with conspicuous reluctance as a theory. An object is baptised, by ostension or by a description used to fix the reference rather than give the meaning, and the name then passes from speaker to speaker, each borrowing the reference from whoever he got it from. Kripke's example is Richard Feynman: "A certain passage of communication reaching ultimately to the man himself does reach the speaker. He then is referring to Feynman even though he can't identify him uniquely." Michael Devitt, his colleague at CUNY, put it to the Times as a great social chain of communication: what a name attaches to is settled by history, not by what is in anyone's head. Kripke declined to turn this into necessary and sufficient conditions; the literature has been supplying them ever since.
Kripkenstein is Kripke's creature, and Kripke said as much on page 5#
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Harvard, 1982) is the other book, and the one that irritates. Kripke takes the rule-following passages of the Philosophical Investigations and extracts a sceptical paradox. Nothing in your past behaviour or conscious states distinguishes your having meant addition all along from your having meant quus, which agrees with addition except that it yields 5 whenever an argument is 57 or greater. No fact about you settles which. The sceptical solution is to stop hunting for the fact and ask whether a community takes your answers as going on in the same way.
The standard objection is that this is not Wittgenstein. John McDowell argued in 1984 that Wittgenstein offers a straight solution, grounding rule-following in training and practice; Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker made the textual case at length the same year. The objection is fair and slightly unfair at once, because Kripke had conceded it in advance. He wrote on page 5 that the book expounds neither Kripke's argument nor Wittgenstein's, but Wittgenstein's argument as it struck Kripke and as it presented a problem for him. Kripkenstein is an acknowledged hybrid. Our longer treatment of why Wittgenstein resists the two-sentence summary takes up what those passages will and will not bear.
The published trace of his generation's most influential philosopher fits on one shelf#
Four books appeared in his lifetime: Naming and Necessity (1980), the Wittgenstein book (1982), Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, Volume 1 (Oxford, 2011) and Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures (Oxford, 2013). Add "Outline of a Theory of Truth" (1975), which handles the liar with truth-value gaps and a fixed point, and that is most of the citable Kripke. Devitt's estimate, given to the Graduate Center, is that when Kripke arrived around 90 per cent of his work was unpublished. The Saul Kripke Center, founded there in 2007 and now directed by Yale Weiss, holds the archive: tapes, transcripts of lectures he never wrote up, manuscripts circulated privately for decades. Posthumous editing rarely alters a philosopher's standing. Here it might.
Eucken was born at Aurich in East Frisia on 5 January 1846. In 1871 he took the chair of philosophy at Basel in succession to his teacher Gustav Teichmüller, beating to it a young professor of classical philology at the same university who had applied to switch faculties: Friedrich Nietzsche. He moved to Jena in 1874 and never left.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to a working philosopher four times: Eucken in 1908, Bergson in 1927, Russell in 1950 and Sartre in 1964, who declined it. The 1908 award was a compromise. The Swedish Academy had deadlocked between Algernon Charles Swinburne, favoured by its chairman Carl David af Wirsén, and Selma Lagerlöf, whom he did not, and reached for Eucken as a representative of Nobel's stipulation that the prize honour work of an idealistic tendency.
His subject was Geistesleben, spiritual life, understood as something real and independent in which individuals participate by effort rather than contemplation. Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt (1896) is the central statement and Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens (1908) the one that sold. He was more admired abroad than at home: lecture tours to America, England, Sweden and Hungary, a Chinese readership, Eucken societies forming in the United States before Germany, and in 1912 a Bergson preface to the French translation.
Then it stopped. The entry in the Biographisches Lexikon für Ostfriesland is blunt: Eucken founded no school, and colleagues judged the work scientifically worthless once he turned to popular philosophy. Burton Feldman, in his history of the Nobel, wrote that Eucken is so forgotten that even philosophers are usually surprised to learn he was one. The collapse needed no refutation, nobody having bothered. It needed a body of work with no technical core to argue over, a lay following that made him embarrassing to professionals, and a war that discredited the register he wrote in. His student Max Scheler is still read, and so is Bergson. Eucken is the control group.
Lazarus defined a people as those who count each other as one, and then lost the word#
Lazarus took his Berlin doctorate in 1850 under Herbart's influence and was professor of psychology at Bern from 1860, later teaching at the Prussian war academy and at Berlin. With Steinthal he launched the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, which ran under their joint editorship from 1860 to 1890. The programme held that a people has a collective mental life, legible in what it makes: language, myth, custom, law. The point later lost is that their Volksgeist was psychological rather than biological. As Martin Kusch renders the 1860 definition, a Volk is a group of people who look upon themselves as a Volk, who count each other as members of the same Volk. Blood and soil were explicitly insufficient. The mutual naming makes the thing.
He had a practical reason to hold that line. On 15 November 1879 Heinrich von Treitschke published "Unsere Aussichten" in the Preußische Jahrbücher, containing the sentence that gave German antisemitism its slogan for sixty years. Lazarus called on Berlin's Jews to organise a reply and gave his own on 2 December 1879 at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, as the lecture Was heißt national?, printed as a pamphlet early in 1880. Nationality rests on shared history, shared moral commitments and voluntary identification, he argued, not on descent, language or religion — the definition he had been publishing for twenty years, applied where it hurt.
The downstream history is worse than the argument deserved, and no honest account leaves Lazarus entirely clear of it. Wilhelm Wundt took the label for his ten-volume Völkerpsychologie (1900–1920) and narrowed it to language, myth and custom in early communal life; on Kusch's reading he gave up the essentials of the strong programme while keeping its name. Others kept only the name, and Egbert Klautke's history of the field traces how Willy Hellpach used folk psychology to accommodate himself to the Third Reich. A vocabulary of collective mental character, invented by a Jewish liberal to argue that peoplehood rests on mutual recognition, could be filled with race by anyone who cared to, and was. That does not refute Lazarus. It is a reason to watch what a concept can be made to carry once its name is loose.
Which is where the three meet, if they meet anywhere. A name reaches its object along a chain of people who pass it on, and nobody in the chain need know much for it to hold together. That is Kripke's claim about "Feynman"; read uncharitably, it is also what became of Völkerpsychologie. Eucken is the other failure mode: his chain broke, and a reputation that was worldwide in 1908 survives as a line in a list of laureates that readers skim past.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
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