“Networks of Influence and Scholarly Samizdats: The Social Circulation of Saul Kripke’s Lectures in the 20th century"

Description

Peer reviewed Conference Paper as part of a panel on Unauthorised Reproduction and Knowledge Diffusion

American philosopher Saul Kripke’s work on necessity and possibility revolutionized contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of language and modal logic in the 20th Century. Kripke’s ideas remain central to philosophical debate in the analytic tradition yet, much of his work remains unpublished and a great deal of his influence stems from the private circulation of lectures and other unpublished work. This paper examines the dissemination of Kripke’s lectures in the late 20th Century via an ad hoc network of scholars and students who produced unofficial transcriptions, recordings and distributed them via unauthorised copies and informal networks of circulation. It considers the material dimensions of scholarly discourse and seeks to understand how philosophers marshalled technologies of reproduction to build knowledge networks and protect discursive traditions.
In Kripke’s published works he offers explicit genealogies of their production and refers to their ‘samizdat’ transcriptions and antecedents (eg Kripke 1982, x). The invocation of a samizdat—the underground network of publication and distribution by dissidents in the Soviet Union (Zaslavskaya 2008)—merits attention as it suggests that the creation of a space for scholarship that exists outside of the official channels is a desired and necessary one. It also highlights the social dimension of philosophical publication and nods to a poetic dimension to the circulation of Kripke’s work and reputation. Tracing the cultural history of Kripke’s unauthorised publications is an opportunity to identify key narratives about how philosophy should be practiced, throughout its history and in the contemporary university, and to consider how oral traditions and informal discursive spaces have been preserved, simulated, altered and adapted via documentation, mediation and circulation. (263 words)
Kripke, S. A. (1982) Wittgenstein on rules and private language: an elementary exposition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Period	28 Jul 2021
Event title	Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing 2021: Moving Texts: From Discovery to Delivery
Event type	Conference
Location	Muenster, GermanyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International