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Early Life
Hilary Putnam was born July 31, 1926 in Chicago, IL. Putnam died at the age of 89 on March 13, 2016. -
Lectures in Philosophy
Putnam received his Ph.D. in 1951 from UCLA. He taught at Northwestern University (1951-1952), Princeton University (1953-1961), where he received tenure in both the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Mathematics in 1960, and after that at M.I.T. (1961-1965). He joined the Philosophy department at Harvard in 1976, retiring in 2000. (Harvard EDU, 2020) -
The Meaning of ‘Meaning’
In 1975, Putnam proposed his first major paper titled "The Meaning of ‘Meaning’", which construes meanings not as purely mental entities (e.g., mental images) or as purely conceptual constructs but as being anchored in external reality. (Ben-Menahem, 2005) -
Interview with Putnam
Bryan Magee and Hilary Putnam discuss some of the basic issues in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics including the nature of scientific knowledge, scientific method, demarcation, objectivity, the notion of truth (e.g. the correspondence theory), inductive logic, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8kDNF_nEc -
Later Work
Realism with a Human Face (1990), Words and Life (1994), Ethics without Ontology (2004), Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (2008), and Philosophy in the Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism (2012). These writings convey a deep sense of moral commitment that had become as characteristic of Putnam's thinking as his lifelong commitment to objective truth. -
Works Cited
-Ben-Menahem, Yemima. Hilary Putnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Web.
-Harvard Edu. (2020). Hilary Putnam. Cogan University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy. Retrieved August 08, 2020. Web.
-YouTube. (1978). Philosophy of Science with Hilary Putnam-BBC Program. Retrieved 2020. Web.
