I mentioned the 1977 NYT article about Kripke in connection with the memorial notice posted last week. As it happens, that article generated a number of letters to the editor which are here; they are a curious assortment, including the usual sneering at analytic philosophers that has continued until the present. There is a lot wrong with so-called analytic philosophy, to be sure, but taking it out on Kripke, who is as good as any analytic philosopher in the last 100 years, is bizarre: analytic philosophy, like many other traditions, has contributed to knowledge and understanding of its topics (even if others did not care about those topics!), and Kripke contributed more than almost everyone.
There is the belief that if one first resolves some “logical” problems, one can then go on to deal with “problems of human experience.” But as almost three centuries of epistemology show, that rarely happens and there is, on the part of those who would make it, little self‐consciousness of the inadequacy of the tools derived from mathematics and physics for dealing with these questions. The result is that they are not dealt with by the’ establishment Kripke represents_ Moreover, the main interest of these philosophers is not to advance the discussion in a community seeking truth, but to score points — the epitome is the clever put‐down against each other.
Professor Smith's caricature of analytic philosophers as "put down" specialists is certainly instantiated by many, but not by Kripke, ironically. And what of Professor Smith's contributions to understanding the "problems of human experience"? There are none that anyone reads. He was part of a generation of tenured mediocrities that destroyed the Yale department's reputation for thirty years.
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