[1] The transcript was brought out originally in 1972 in Semantics of Natural Language, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman.

Kripke attributes variants of descriptivist theories to Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, among others.

Examples include "Hesperus is Phosphorus", "Cicero is Tully", "Water is H2O" and other identity claims where two names refer to the same object.

Quentin Smith has claimed that some of the ideas in Naming and Necessity were first presented (at least in part) by Ruth Barcan Marcus.

[6] Kripke is alleged to have misunderstood Marcus' ideas during a 1969 lecture which he attended (based on the questions he asked), and later arrived at similar conclusions.

Smith's view is controversial, and several well-known scholars (for example, Stephen Neale and Scott Soames) have subsequently offered detailed responses arguing that his account is mistaken.

Kripke's main goals in this first lecture are to explain and critique the existing philosophical opinions on the way that names work.

Before Kripke gave his 'Naming and Necessity' lectures, a number of criticisms of this descriptivist theory had been published by leading philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Searle and Peter Strawson.

In 'Lecture III', Kripke's main aim is to develop his account of the necessity of identity relations, and to discuss many of the implications of his account to issues like the identity of natural kinds, the distinction between epistemic and metaphysical necessity, the notion of metaphysical essences, and the mind–body problem in philosophy of mind.

Two other issues arise by way of recapitulation: First, Kripke concedes that there exist certain limited cases where descriptions do in fact determine reference.

Thus, Kripke claims to have successfully refuted the assumption made by everyone before him that anything that is necessarily true will be known a priori (i.e. Immanuel Kant 1781/1787).