Episode 61: Jeff Buechner discusses Kripke and functionalism
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What is the background of Jeff Buechner’s relationship with Saul Kripke?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from Newark, New Jersey. With me is Jeff Bukner, permanent lecturer in philosophy at Rutgers University Newark. He and Gary Ostertog run the Saul Kripke Center at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and he's here to talk to us about Saul Kripke and functionalism. Jeff Buchner, welcome.
Hi Matt. Nice to uh see you today.
Saul Kripke is, I think, widely acknowledged to be one of the great figures in philosophy of the past century, and he did all sorts of seminal work in logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language. And you've been involved in sort of bringing back some of his unpublished work and um getting it out there again recently. So how did that all get started? How did you come to know Saul Kripke?
I did my graduate work at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. I decided that I would go to one of Saul's seminars in Princeton. We have a nice reciprocation policy. Rutgers students can take courses at Princeton, and Princeton students can take courses at Rutgers, and so I decided to take one of his courses. And before I had taken the course, I thought of his work as the most important work in philosophy. And I had over the years heard him give talks and was astonished by his brilliance. I went to Princeton for one of his seminars and uh it was such an extraordinary experience. He is unlike anyone else, I mean almost supernaturally brilliant. And so I uh I took several seminars, more seminars with Saul than with anyone else in my department.
I also became friends with Saul in the nineties. I used to after seminars uh drive him to the supermarket, pick up some groceries, and we'd continue talking about seminar matters and went to dinner with him many times and uh over a period of three or four years I became his friend. In nineteen ninety seven he retired from Princeton and the problem at that point was what happens to all the stuff in his office, for one thing. I said to him that I would um take care of all of his material in his office. In fact, move it out of his office and either move it to his house or to my office in New Brunswick. He initially was reluctant to do so. He didn't like the idea of anyone seeing his unpublished stuff.
That's to say, the official unpublished stuff and the unofficial published stuff. He was reluctant to let anyone see the unofficial, unpublished stuff. By official unpublished stuff I meant the John Locke lectures and a couple of other things. So I don't know what accounted for the sea change in him, but suddenly he said to me, It's fine. You can take care of all the stuff, and in fact, I'll give you a key to my house and you can look through my house for unpublished stuff, any kinds of papers, and put them together. I spent actually an inordinate amount of time doing this, several years, which unfortunately at that time uh interfered with my dissertation work. I eventually defended my dissertation in the uh January of 2003.
But between nineteen ninety seven and two thousand and three, I spent a great deal of time organizing Sol's manuscripts and actually finding them. His office was incredible in disarray. The um administrative staff at Princeton did not do a very good job of keeping his papers in order. And I found folders, several hundred papers, and the folder would be marked unknown. And it would consist of one or two pages from manuscripts people had sent Saul, from some of Saul's manuscripts. It's a good thing I recognized his handwriting because in one case I pieced together his response to Paul Bonasser's famous talk on mathematical truth. Very few people know this, but Sol responded to that, and there's a handwritten manuscript of about thirty pages.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the background of Jeff Buechner’s relationship with Saul Kripke?
0:00–5:32
2
How did Jeff become the caretaker of Kripke’s unpublished manuscripts?
5:32–12:44
3
What challenges did Jeff face while organizing and preserving Kripke’s papers?
12:44–21:13
4
How does functionalism originate and what does Putnam’s version claim?
21:13–30:10
5
Why does Putnam later reject machine functionalism in his book *Representation in Reality*?
30:10–37:11
6
What is Kripke’s core argument against functionalism and how does it differ from previous critiques?
37:11–41:54
7
What radical consequences follow from Kripke’s claim that physical devices can never perfectly realize abstract computations?
41:54–44:10
8
How does the discussion wrap up and what future directions does Jeff suggest for Kripke‑related research?
44:10–44:42
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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