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Birth
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was born on the 31st of July, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a devout communist making contributions for the Daily Worker, a publication of the American Communist Party. This gave Hilary Putnam a secular upbringing. -
High School Education
Hilary Putnam attended the Central High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he met soon-to-be scientific philosopher Noam Chomsky. Although Noam was a year behind Putnam, the two would become equal parts friend and critic for the rest of Putnam's life. -
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College Education
Hilary Putnam would attend the University of Pennsylvania following his graduation from Central High School. He would receive his Bachelor of Arts, then to Harvard University for his graduate in philosophy. He would then finish his doctorate of philosophy at UCLA in 1951 writing his dissertation "The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences". -
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College Education cont.
References Putnam. Hilary. W. (1951). "The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences" https://books.google.com/books?id=P-KTnW55h9QC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false -
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Northwestern University
Hilary Putnam would teach Philosophy at Northwestern University. -
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Princeton University
Hilary Putnam would teach philosophy at Princeton University until 1961, where he would later teach at MIT. -
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MIT
Hilary Putnam would teach philosophy for a total of four years at MIT until moving later and marrying his soon-to-be wife Ruth Anna Jacobs. -
Marriage and Jewish Ancestry
Hilary Whitehall Putnam would marry Ruth Anna Jacobs on the 11th of August, 1962. Both dealing with antisemitism in their youth, they would take up Jewish traditions culminating to Hilary's late Bar Mitzvah and subsequent establishment of a Jewish household for their future children. -
Multiple Realizability
Putnam's most famous work would taken the philosophy of the mind. He published several papers in hopes of disproving the popular type-identity theory which is the theory that mental events can be categorized into groups. Those groups could interact with the physical composition of the mind Putnam's assertion is that pain differs within nervous systems. Although all would experience the feeling of pain, the physical composition of the mind would vary. -
Multiple Realizability cont.
References Putnam, H. (1975) Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. ISBN 88-459-0257-9 -
Machine State Functionalism
Machine State Functionalism is the theory of Turing machines and the relationship of the mind. This theory suggests that each state of mind can be defined as a series of inputs and outputs. -
Semantic Externalism
Putnam proposed a Twin Earth concept that explained that the same word within two different peoples minds living on two separate planets of varying conditions could not be the exact same; Thus, he proposed a semantic externalism that accounted for subjective experience. References
Marvan, T., ed., What Determines Content? The Internalism/Externalism Dispute (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006), pp. 70–75 -
Disownment of Machine State Functionalism
Following a series of careful consideration and high scrutiny, the thought process he came to be known for. He changed his view on the subject matter and developed an argument against his own work due to the fact that functionalism had difficulties explaining intuitions prompted by externalism. -
Death
Hilary Whitehall Putnam died on the 13th of March 2016 in Arlington Massachusetts.