Saul Kripke: A Portrait of the Modal Logician as a Young Man

In this short intellectual biography, we chronicle Saul Kripke’s involvement in the development of modal logic, focusing on the decade beginning in 1953 and ending in 1963, during which time he ranged in age from 12 to 23. We also describe the state of modal logic before Kripke, Kripke’s correspondence with other modal logicians, and Kripke’s early influential publications on the semantics of modal logic as well as several later and lesser known contributions.