Hilary putnam

Hilary Putnam

By GiddinsA

  • Birth

    Hilary Putnam was born on 31 July 1926 in Chicago, Illinois.

  • Received PhD

    He received his Ph.D. in 1951 from UCLA, where he wrote a dissertation on the concept of probability.

  • Princeton University 1953-1961

    At Princeton, Putnam immersed himself in mathematical logic. He worked on one of the 23 unsolved problems identified by David Hilbert in 1900: that of finding a general algorithm for solving Diophantine equations. The basis for a proof that the problem is unsolvable was provided by Putnam, Martin Davis, and Julia Robinson in 1961 and completed by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970. Ben-Menahem, Y. (2020, July 27). Hilary Putnam. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hilary-Putnam

  • Far-Left Political Ideology

    During the 1960s Putnam was deeply involved in the antiwar movement that opposed U.S. participation in the Vietnam War. He was active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and in the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist group, but by the early 1970s he had become disillusioned with far-left political ideology. Ben-Menahem, Y. (2020, July 27). Hilary Putnam. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hilary-Putnam

  • Functionalism

    Putnam introduced functionalism which defines mental states in terms of functional roles relative to other mental states. In “Philosophy and Our Mental Life” (1975), he says: The question of the autonomy of our mental life…has nothing to do with that all too popular…question about matter or soul-stuff. We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter.
    Ben-Menahem, Y. (2020, July 27). Hilary Putnam. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hilary-Putnam

  • Realism and Meaning

    Putnam’s philosophy theme is his defense of realism, that assertions are objectively true or false. He distinguished between knowledge and mere belief, convention, dogma, and superstition. He often revised his earlier positions. The biggest change was in 1976, when he attacked a view he called “metaphysical realism,” saying that “internal realism” be adopted instead.
    Ben-Menahem, Y. (2020, July 27). Hilary Putnam. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hilary-Putnam

  • Reason, Truth and History

    Whether Putnam’s early realism was ever “metaphysical” is questionable, but it's clear that his critique of metaphysical realism gives his philosophy a Kantian bent; this is particularly salient in the papers collected in Reason, Truth and History (1981). After initially calling his position “internal realism,” Putnam later referred to it as “commonsense realism”.
    Ben-Menahem, Y. (2020, July 27). Hilary Putnam. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hilary-Putnam

  • Traditional Philosophy

    Putnam became more critical of scientism, a view that all knowledge is scientific. He preferred philosophy reassert its traditional role of guiding, edifying, and inspiring human life. His later works, Realism with a Human Face (1990) for example, attest to this. They convey a sense of moral commitment as characteristic of his thinking as his commitment to objective truth. Ben-Menahem, Y. (2020, July 27). Hilary Putnam. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hilary-Putnam

  • Death

    Hilary Putnam died in his home on 13 March 2016, at age 89, due to metastasized mesothelioma.
    Here is link to a YouTube video of an interview with Putnam about Scientific Theories and Realism https://youtu.be/vWNjTnAB8ac