Foucault and Kripke on the Proper Names of Authors

The semantic issues that Saul Kripke addressed in Naming and Necessity overlap with those addressed by Michel Foucault in “What Is an Author?” The present essay examines this area of overlap. It shows that Foucault needs to take certain assumptions from Kripke’s theory of naming in order to secure his argument for treating authorial names as a special case. When placed on these Kripkean foundations, Foucault’s theory is a plausible one, and avoids the metaphysically peculiar commitments that are sometimes thought to be essential to it.