Me & Saul

Me & Saul Saul – Kripke, that is – has been labeled the most influential philosopher of the second half of the 20th Century. Wikipedia says, “[f]rom the 1960s until his death, he was a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical and modal logic, philosophy of language and mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory.” Me? I play tennis and feed hummingbirds. I only saw Saul once. It was at the 1957-58 Nebraska High School Science Fair. The fair was held on the campus of the University of Nebraska – which is now known as UNL. But I’m getting ahead of the story. Saul Aaron Kripke was born in Long Island, five months after my birth in Lincoln, Nebraska; but he was raised from age 6 in Omaha. I was born in the house once owned and later dedicated as a hospital by William Jennings Bryan. (That’s about the end of my celebrity.) Saul was the eldest of three children – one boy, two girls – born to Rabbi Myer and Dorothy Kripke. Myer was the rabbi of Beth El, the only conservative synagouge in Omaha. Saul taught himself ancient Hebrew by the age of six, read the Shakespearean plays by age nine, and mastered the writings of Descartes and complex mathematics before the end of sixth grade. I took up tennis at age 40. Our friend Marlyne Freedman was BFF with Saul’s younger sister Netta. Occasionally, the two would have an overnight at the Kripkes. It was clear to Marlyne that something was not quite right about her friend’s brother Saul. Saul would frantically walk up and down stairs from the first to the upper level for hours after everyone had turned in. Nobody talked about Aspergers in those days. But back to the science fair. I hated high school, or rather, I hated the things they taught in high school until second semester of grade 12 when it became obvious that the coaches were no longer interested in me. At that point I picked out chemistry as something to like. As the science fair approached – it was held in February – a couple of us cast about for a project to put on display. I put two things together and came up with an atom weighing machine. If you put a copper plate and a carbon rod in a beaker of copper-sulfate solution and connect them to a battery, you’d have something. Actually, if you could figure out how many electrons passed through that system at a certain amperage for a certain period of time, and you knew that two electrons would plate out one copper atom, and you knew that Coulomb and Avogadro – oh, forget it. It actually made sense. And the first time I tried it, it produced the weight of a copper atom with only 5% error. The second time – on a Saturday with my friends Dave and Rod on hand to exercise additional control – the estimated weight was off by 30%. My first experience with reliability. All the same, even if I couldn’t nail down the exact weight of one copper atom, the system was beautiful: a big beaker of crystal-clear blue solution, wires, amp meters, a big battery. In fact, my display was a huge hit at the science fair. Attendees huddled around my display as I proudly described the first run-through of the atom weighing machine. No point boring them with the story of the second attempt. The display right next to mine – stage right – was a white posterboard with some letters and funny looking scribbles on it. It was entitled “The System LE.” Its creator stood in front of the poster behind a table with his knuckles flat on the table, rocking back and forth. Davening; I had never seen such a thing before; neither the rocking nor the stuff on the posterboard. Everybody was fascinated by my bubbling solution and wires. No one was paying attention to Saul. He was a Finalist for the Westinghouse Science Talent Award that year. The 1958 winner eventually in 1990 invented a device for performing jaw exercises. Saul once described the fair as “one of the memorable experiences of my life.” It certainly was such for me. It was a Friday in February. The fair wrapped up around 4 PM. As Dave and I walked out of the auditorium we noticed Saul, his classmate (see Note below), and an adult, who was probably their teacher, in animated conversation. My buddy Dave said that they were worried about whether they could make it back to Omaha before sundown. I never saw Saul again. But my friend Dave did. Six months later, Dave went off to Harvard, while I went off to the tiny college two miles away, the only college I could afford or be admitted to. Saul also went off to Harvard. Dave and Saul were enrolled in the same Freshman calculus course. Six-weeks exam. The bluebooks are passed out, the testing period was ON. No Saul. Twenty minutes later, Saul rushes in, plops down in a seat in the front row, and starts working … and davening. In fact, the davening was so extreme and distracting that a couple of students went up to the proctor and told him to get that guy outta here! Dave says that was the last time he saw Saul. Rumor had it that in the very next year, Saul was teaching a graduate-level seminar in logic at MIT. My tennis buddy Jerry was finishing his PhD in Psychology at Princeton in the mid-1970s when Saul accepted an endowed professorship there in philosophy, of course. His most famous book, Naming and Necessity (1980), is one of the major philosophical works of the 20th century, I am told. I bought it a few years ago; I gave up on page 4. Saul was apparently the object of a good deal of curiosity around Princeton. His wife, Margaret Gilbert – also a philosopher and British, whose family name was once Goldberg – drove Saul wherever he had to go, bought his clothes, cooked his meals, and generally did all the mundane tasks of ordinary life, like buying tennis balls and cleaning hummingbird feeders. They divorced. Saul died on September 15, 2022, of pancreatic cancer. Note Saul's classmate was Richard Speier , no small celebrity himself.