Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, Volume 1

This important new book is the first of a series of volumes collecting the essential articles by the eminent and highly influential philosopher Saul A. Kripke. It presents a mixture of published and unpublished articles from various stages of Kripke's storied career.
Included here are seminal and much discussed pieces such as "Identity and Necessity", "Outline of a Theory of Truth", "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference", and "A Puzzle About Belief." More recent published articles include "Russell's Notion of Scope" and "Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference" among others. Several articles are published here for the first time, including both older works ("Two Paradoxes of Knowledge", "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities", "Nozick on Knowledge") as well as newer ("The First Person" and "Unrestricted Exportation"). "A Puzzle on Time and Thought" was written expressly for this volume.
Publication of this volume — which ranges over epistemology, linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy, theory of truth, and metaphysics — represents a major event in contemporary analytic philosophy. It will be of great interest to the many who are interested in the work of one its greatest living figures.

"Saul Kripke's work has significantly changed the way we look at fundamental philosophical problems today. His 1972 lectures at Princeton University, published as Naming and Necessity, helped to shatter a centuries-old consensus on the nature of the fundamental semantical concepts of connotation and reference, as well as challenging received ideas about necessity and contingency. Subsequently he proposed the first new formal theory of truth since Alfred Tarski's epochal work in the 1930s, and he also proposed a widely discussed (and radically new) interpretation of Wittgenstein's most famous work, Philosophical Investigations, one which seems sure to continue to be at the center of virtually every discussion of Wittgenstein's philosophy. This collection of his papers, which contains a number of previously unpublished essays, is more than welcome; it is something every philosopher will want to own." - Hilary Putnam, Philosophy (Emeritus), Harvard University

"A great deal of this work is new-that is, not the classic canonical Saul Kripke everyone already knows about. True, some of it had been circulating in samizdat form. But more often it was just the ideas that were circulating, and whether for broken telephone reasons, or because the ideas have been evolving, they are oftentimes different (and more challenging) than previously reported. Throughout one finds the trademark Kripkean combination of shining insights combined with an open-mindedness about what is ultimately to be made of them." Stephen Yablo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"I have learned more from Saul Kripke than from any other philosopher of our time." David Kaplan, University of California, Los Angeles