Manuel Perez Otero, Esbozo de la filosofia de Kripke.
| Autor | Garcia-Carpintero, Manuel |
| Cargo | Reseña de libro |
Manuel Pérez Otero, Esbozo de la filosofía de Kripke, Montesinos, Barcelona, 2006, 276 pp.
This book is an introduction, intended mainly for philosophy students at undergraduate level, of the main themes in Saul Kripke's philosophy of language --and hence of those central to the subject as it has been reconfigured by Kripke's work. Given the assumed interests of its intended audience, the book focuses on Naming and Necessity and "A Puzzle about Belief", introducing readers to issues in the theory of reference, essence and modality, and philosophy of mind in those works. It avoids more technical matters, such as Kripke's contributions to the semantics of modal logic or the theory of truth and truth-paradoxes, but also the other very significant Kripkean contribution to contemporary philosophy of language, his discussion of Wittgenstein on rules and rule-following. Aside from some richer footnotes, the book adopts an expository stance, staying away from critical discussions of the views it presents.
Given Pérez Otero's goals, all these are judicious decisions: the book is one of the best introductions I have read to these subjects, so I would recommend it wholeheartedly to undergraduate and graduate students who are studying them, teachers who have to present them to their students, and more in general to everybody looking for a first-class introduction to the core issues in contemporary philosophy of language and metaphysics. The book provides a very good picture of recent debates about the Frege-Russell descriptivist view of reference, its main motivation (ch. 1 and 2), Kripke's main arguments against it (ch. 3), the problems that the alternative Millian picture sketched by Kripke has to confront and his suggestions of how to deal with them (ch. 3), the problems posed to the theory of reference by our practices of belief-ascription and their possible source (ch. 5), the role that modal matters play in contemporary accounts of meaning and truth-conditions (ch. 1 and 3), Kripke's influential separation between modal and epistemic modality, necessary truth and a priori knowledge (ch. 3), his reinstatement of Aristotelian essentialism from its relegation since Hume and Kant to Carnap and Quine (ch. 6), and, last but not least, Kripke's challenges to easily self-contented contemporary forms of materialism about the mind-body problem (ch. 4).
Two very good examples of the virtues I am extolling in the book are provided by Pérez Otero's discussion of two topics that are initially (and perhaps not just initially) puzzling to anybody approaching Kripke's work. Firstly, the reason why it is not simply that unicorns and Sherlock Holmes do not exist, but (to put it crudely) in fact they could not have existed --Kripke himself had simply taken for granted in previous work that, even though Sherlock Holmes was a figment of Conan Doyle's imagination, he of course could have existed (pp. 191-196). Secondly, the contention that, in contrast to the case of "water is [H.sub.2]O" and "Hesperus is Phosphorus", where there is an acceptable explanation for the illusory appearance that those statements are not necessary, in the case of "pain is C fiber stimulation" the best explanation is that the appearance is correct and thus the impression of contingency non-illusory (pp. 205-220). In both cases, the discussion is fully non-technical: nothing is said about the peculiarities of fictional discourse in the first case (which Kripke himself later addressed in an as yet unpublished set of lectures), or about fancy "two-dimensional semantics" in the second; I am pretty sure that any attentive reader of Pérez Otero's introduction will have no difficulty in grasping Kripke's train of thought. The text studiously avoids discussion of the huge controversy generated by these issues, especially the second one (to which I will come back later); but that was the intent.
In spite of its introductory nature, the book includes original and illuminating material, starting with its main interpretative orientation, the linguistic particularism that Pérez Otero ascribes to...
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu pruebaCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
