On The Return From Kripke’s Proper Name Theory To Mill’s Proper Name Theory

Since the middle 1800’s,many philosophers have studied the proper names in a detailed manner. As the first philosopher to research proper names after the Enlightenment, Mill formulated his classic theory on this topic. The essential viewpoints of his theory are: proper names have only references but no senses; proper names are not denoting phrases or descriptions. Mill’s theory was later criticized and refuted by scholars including Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein and others. But during the 1960’s, Kripke criticized the description theory and cluster theory, by means of the distinction between two kinds of designators and essentialism,and presented his own theory on proper names.Kripke’s proper name theory intends to justify a number of conclusions in Mill’s proper name theory, and offered more detailed argumentation. From this perspective, we can deem Kripke’s proper name theory as a return or resurgence to Mill’s proper name theory. Although a kind of return to Mill’s proper name theory, Kripke’s theory also surpassed Mill’s in ways, such as in different views about the relationships of proper names and general names, and in naming theory of proper names.This dissertation focused on the comparison of the theories on proper names formulated by Mill and Kripke and others, and presented that the major reason of their differences were originated from different views of essentialism. The significance of this paper is that it tries to analyze the resemblances and differences between Mill’s theory and Kripke’s theories from a essentialism perspective. Furthermore, it absorbed some of the resources outside of the analytic philosophy coterie, and gave a better presentation of the issues by a historic perspective, hoping to gain new notions.