Reference and Existence

Reviews / Votes

For one thing, Reference and Existence includes many long, substantive footnotes (obviously composed very recently) that demonstrate that in his [Kripke's] seventies he is capable of philosophical thinking of the same high order that made him famous when he was a young man ... I cannot possibly convey, within the scope of this review, the subtlety, richness and beautiful logical coherence of Kripke's treatment of the ontology of fiction. It is a good thing that these superb lectures have finally been published * Peter Van Inwagen, The Times Literary Suppliment * In the introduction to the book, Kripke modestly worries whether publication of this material 'would still be of some interest' (p. ix). 'Of course', this reviewer concludes. And this reviewer stresses further that publication finally allows an extremely important body of work to take its rightful place in the published canon of analytic philosophy. * Jody Azzouni, Mind * I will simply say that this is a book that you must read if you want to know where Kripke's thinking took him when he took the revolutionary views he developed in Naming and Necessity and confronted the problem of empty names and nonexistence. Along the way you will also learn an important part of the reason why the debate about empty names has taken the direction it has over the last forty or so years and why it continues to occupy centre stage in the philosophy of language. * The Philosophical Quarterly * Reference and Existence shall be an influential work in various contemporary debates and discussions since it contains countless dilemnas, questions, proposals and innovative ideas regarding the relation between reference and existence, fictional characters and discourse, negative existentials, semantical and speaker's reference, indirect discourse and modal notions. * Adam Tamas Tuboly, Buchbesprechungen. *