A while ago, I noticed in Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? an unfavorable reference to Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, concerning the implications of the name "Aristotle". I don't think that MacIntyre was quite fair to Kripke, who argued against (I believe) Russell's theory of definite descriptions. I jotted a question mark in the margin, kept on reading, and spent a couple of weeks not thinking about Aristotle.
Last week, though, I picked up Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, intervening reading having made me curious about Frege's argument that the reference of a sentence is a truth value. Along the way, in the famous essay "On Sense and Reference", a couple of pages in I encountered a footnote on the sense of such a name as "Aristotle".
It is easy to forget, but Aristotle, Hesperus (or the evening star), Phosphorus (or the morning star), as cases for such arguments do go back to Frege.
The essay appeared in 1892, Naming and Necessity in 1972, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in 1988.
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