Saul A. Kripke is one of the most creative and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. It is not an exaggeration to say that he helped change the face of analytic philosophy in the last half of the century. He was born in New York on 13 November 1940. When he was a young child his family moved to Nebraska, where he was raised. Even as a child Kripke exhibited a great talent for mathematics together with an interest in philosophical questions. It is reported that he read the complete works of Shakespeare while in the fourth grade and he published a paper on the completeness of modal logic (which had a substantive impact on philosophy) when he was only 18 years old. He was appointed to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1963, became an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rockefeller University, New York in 1968, and was appointed the McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University in 1977. In 1973, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford and he was the subject of a New York Times Magazine article entitled “New Frontiers in American Philosophy” (1977). He became Professor Emeritus at Princeton in 1998.

One of the major changes of direction philosophy has taken in the latter third of the twentieth century is the revitalization of metaphysics as an area of research. As an area of interest in philosophy, metaphysics had just about died out under the constant attacks of the logical positivists, the ordinary language school of philosophy, and the nominalism of W. V. Quine and Nelson Goodman (although clearly Quine's work was concerned with metaphysical issues).