Today I was reading a lot of “classical” essays about proper names. I began with Strawson’s “On Referring”. After Frege and Russell’s logicism Strawson turned the focus on usage and context in everyday language. Very obviously he’s a initiator of speach act theory but also Wittgenstein is not far.
Tyler Burge’s “Reference and Proper Names” presents a enjoyable variety of non-standard examples of usages of proper names. Pointing out possible pluralities of extension helps him to develop his thesis of proper names being predicates.
I very much like the paper “Über die seltsame Notwendigkeit von Freges “Sinn”-Begriff für Kripkes Theorie der Eigennamen” by Armin Burkhardt. Especially cause I found there a few things which I was searching for already:
- considering Kripkes division of ’speaker’s’ and ’semantical reference’ while discussing his theory of direct reference
- comparing this very division to Saussure’s parole and langue
- a trial to develop a hybrid conception of proper names, especially with the help of Wittgenstein’s philosophy
Then I was swimming a bit 
In the evening I worked on slides for a speach about proper names, beginning with a chronological overview of the history of this problem in philosophy (it will be uploaded soon here). Then I added some slides about Mill’s conception of proper names - that is Mill playing on Wittgenstein’s “Vorstellungsklavier”.
