Timeline2 hilary putnam

Hilary Putnam (July 31, 1926 - March 13, 2016)

By MeganCherry

  • Born

    Born in Chicago, Illinois. Putnam would become a leading philosopher of his time, making major contributions in seven different fields of of science.

  • Achieves a PhD

    Putnam began his degree path at the University of Pennsylvania where he studied philosophy and mathematics. He went to Harvard for graduate school and then ended with a Ph.D at the University of California at Los Angeles where he did his dissertation on the concept of probability.
    Ben-Menahem, Yemima. 2020. Hilary Putnam, Encyclopedia Britanica inc. web https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hilary-Putnam

  • Meaning and Reference

    Meaning and Reference
    Putnam asks, do our psychological states fix the references of our terms? He believed that meanings were not only affected by our minds, but also the physical world around us. In his Twin Earth experiment,he explains that Earth and its identical Twin Earth are made of the exact same things. Person A and identical twin on Twin Earth, Twin A. Both perceive to have water. The problem? A's water is H2O and Twin A's is made of XYZ. Do both have water?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYcbmpJMDGo

  • Reality, Truth, and History

    Reality, Truth, and History
    Are we really just visions of a brain in a vat? Putnam revisits the idea that we are just brains in a vat of fluid, hooked up to a computer, with electrical pulses going to and from the computer. The argument states that what we view as reality is, in fact, visions the brain is seeing. In other words, our physical world is actually fake. Putnam reasons against the argument. Hickey, Lance P., The Brain in a Vat Argument. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, web.

  • Professor Hilary Putnam

    Hilary Putnam began his teachings at Northwestern University as an instructor in philosophy in 1952. He then would continue his journey to Princeton as an assistant professor, then associate professor, to professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts institute of Technology, to Harvard in 1965, the Walton Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic in 1976, and appointed the Cogan University Professor in the department of philosophy in 1995.

  • Death