Back to the Golden Age: Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity and Twenty-First Century Philosophy

In this paper, I try to outline what I take to be Naming and Necessity's fundamental legacy to my generation and those that follow, and the new perspectives it has opened up for twenty-first century philosophy. The discussion is subdivided into three sections, concerning respectively philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. The general unifying theme is that Naming and Necessity is helping philosophy to recover a Golden Age, by freeing it from the strictures coming from the empiricist and Kantian traditions and reconnecting it to the world and the objects that populate it. Because of this, in the concluding paragraph I tentatively suggest that Kripke's philosophy may be seen as a sui generis form of naturalism.