Keith Donnellan
| Keith Donnellan | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 25, 1931 Washington, DC |
| Died | February 20, 2015 Fairfax, CA |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable work | "Reference and Definite Descriptions", "Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions", "Speaking of Nothing" |
| Institutions | UCLA |
|
Main interests
|
Philosophy of language |
Keith Sedgwick Donnellan (25 June 1931, Washington, DC – 20 February 2015, Fairfax, CA) was an analytic philosopher and Professor Emeritus of the UCLA department of Philosophy. He spent most of his career at UCLA but taught, before that, at Cornell, where he also earned his PhD. Donnellan contributed to the philosophy of language, most notably to the analysis of proper names and definite descriptions. For instance, Donnellan criticized Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions for overlooking the distinction between referential and attributive use of definite descriptions.
By 1970, analytic philosophers widely accepted a view regarding the reference-relation that holds of proper names and that which they name which is known as descriptivism and attributed to Bertrand Russell. Descriptivism holds that ordinary proper names (e.g., 'Socrates', 'Richard Feynman', and 'Madagascar') may be paraphrased by definite descriptions (e.g., 'Plato's favorite philosopher', 'the man who devised the theory of quantum electrodynamics', and 'the largest island off the southeastern coast of Africa'). Saul Kripke gave a series of three lectures at Princeton University in 1970, later published as Naming and Necessity, in which he argued against Descriptivism and sketched the "Causal-Historical View of Reference" according to which each proper name necessarily designates a particular object and that the identity of the object so designated is determined by the history of the name's use. These lectures were highly influential and marked the decline of Descriptivism's popularity. Kripke's alternative view was, by his own account, not fully developed in his lectures. Donnellan's work on proper names is among the earliest and most influential developments of the Causal-Historical View of Reference.
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