-
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science.
-
Putnam was enrolled in various colleges learning different things all throughout his life. He started school his long journey at university of Pennsylvania where he studied Mathematics and Philosophy. From there he went to UCLA & Harvard to obtain more studies in Philosophy. It was finally at UCLA where he obtained a Ph.D! He continued his love for philosophy by going to three different universities across the country to be a professor. He retired in 2000 as a professor from Harvard. -
During his times as a professor his sole theme of philosophy was his strong willed defense of realism. It wasn't until the year of 1976 that there was a world wide change when he launched an attack on the view called "Metaphysical realism". Another attack that Putnam had was against the logical positivists. Putnam argued that the verifications view of scientific theories rendered the overwhelming success of a science miracle. This argument came to be known as the “no-miracle” argument. -
If Putnam wasn't already blowing peoples mind, he continued to do so while teaching. Putnam had enormous impacts on the philosophy of mind are as well. It was here that he introduced the doctrine known as functionalism, or also known as "machine functionalism". What this does is attempt to define mental states in terms of their roles and how they relate to other mental states and behaviors. He followed all this up by publishing a book called "Philosophy and Our Mental Life in 1978