KRIPKE, Saul A.

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"A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic". First edition, first printing, of the author's first major work, published when he was only 18 years old, which provided the foundations for Kripke's innovations in modal logic and semantics.Saul Kripke (1940-2022) was "one of the most penetrating minds of our time. His achievements span the disciplines of philosophy, logic and mathematics. From his post at Princeton University, where he was James McCosh Professor of Philosophy, and his previous post at Rockefeller University, Kripke established a towering reputation as one of the two or three most eminent philosophers in the English-speaking world...Kripke's contributions to philosophy have extended the boundaries of the most unfamiliar and technical regions of modern analytic philosophy - where philosophical reasoning intermingles with abstract mathematic theory. He worked in the field of modal logic, a branch of formal logic that has introduced ways to distinguish kinds of true statements... Before Kripke, modal logicians - including the inventor of modal logic, C. I. Lewis - did not have the mathematical tools to analyze many of the most important kinds of English sentences. One of Kripke's major achievements was the invention of 'possible world semantics,' a form of modal logic that has shown to the satisfaction of most philosophers that the common-sense understanding of the concepts 'possibility' and 'necessity' in true statements can be mathematically proved" (Branch, p. 180).

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