Saul Kripke — Naming and Necessity (1972)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Rehabilitation of Metaphysics
Saul Kripke (b. 1940) revolutionized analytic philosophy with Naming and Necessity (1972). Against the prevailing view, he argued: metaphysics is possible. There are necessary truths that are not analytic — truths about the world, not merely about language.[1]
The theory of rigid designators: Names (like “Aristotle”) do not refer through descriptions (“the author of the Nicomachean Ethics”) but directly — they designate the same person in all possible worlds. Names are “rigid designators.”
This has metaphysical consequences: if “water = H₂O” is true, then it is necessarily true — water could not be anything other than H₂O. This is not an analytic truth (we discovered empirically that water is H₂O), but it is necessary (in every possible world in which water exists, it is H₂O).
The rehabilitation of essentialism: Kripke thereby rehabilitated essentialism — the idea that things have essential properties that make them what they are. Aristotle could not have been non-Aristotle; gold could not have been anything other than the element with atomic number 79.
The complicated relation to Hegel: Kripke’s essentialism is not Hegelian — Hegel criticized traditional essentialism as static, as incapable of thinking development. But Kripke’s rehabilitation of metaphysics opened doors that logical empiricism had closed. If necessary truths about the world are possible, then the empiricist rejection of all metaphysics is no longer tenable.[2]
The Pittsburgh School (Volume III) will connect Kripke’s insights with Hegel’s dialectic: conceptual necessity is not static essentialism but dynamic self-unfolding — concepts develop, their necessity is processual, not fixed.