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Hilary Putnam's Early Life and Career (1926-2016)
Putnam was born in Chicago in 1926, an only child to "Samuel and Riva Putnam. His father was a writer and translator, an active communist, and a columnist for the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA)."(Ben-Menahem 2021) The Putnams lived in Paris until 1934 before moving to Philadelphia where he graduated from the university of Pennsylvania. He then went on to study at UCLA where he earned his Ph. D. in 1951. -
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Hilary Putnam's Mid Life and Career (1926-2016)
During his time at UCLA he worked with Hans Reichenbach. Then from (1951-52) he taught at Northwestern University before going on to teach at Princeton University from (1953-61). In 1960 he received tenure in both the Department of mathematics and the Department of philosophy. But, despite this, he would leave shorty after to teach at M.I.T. from (1961-65). -
Hilary Putman's Time at Princeton (1926-2016)
After becoming acquainted with Rudolf Carnap a well know logical positivist and mathematical logician Georg Kreisel, Putnam became immersed in the study of mathematical logic. "Among other projects, he worked on one of the 23 unsolved problems in mathematics identified by David Hilbert in 1900: that of finding a general algorithm for solving Diophantine equations" (Ben-Menahem 2021). Putnam provided the basis for the truth that the problem was in fact unsolvable. -
Hilary Putman's ethical views (1926-2016)
Ethical questions played a very important role in Putnam's life, they were the main motivator in not only his switch to Judaism in the 1970's, but also his anti-war activism and politics. He rejected the idea that there was a traditional division between matters of fact and questions of value."Since David Hume in the 18th century, the so-called “fact/value dichotomy” has dominated the thinking about science and ethics."(The Irish Times 2016). He believed this to be incorrect. -
Hilary Putman and the Philosophy of Science (1926-2016)
Puntam was well known for his philosophical views of science and the way he was easy to question even himself. This aversion to dogmatism characterized him, his versatility even being compared to the likes of Aristotle."In the philosophy of science, Putnam subscribed to scientific realism, the belief that theoretical claims of science are to be taken as describing reality – that science aims to produce true descriptions of things in the universe." (Boruah 2016). -
The Many Faces of Realism (1987)
In "The Many Faces of Realism (1987)" Puntam introduced realism in a way that concentrates on the substitutes to metaphysical realism and cultural relativism. He defends moral objectivity while assessing kantian circumstances through historical context. Realism stood as the unifying theme of his philosophical ideas, and it presented in many aspects of his work. Whether it was related to scientific realism or internal realism. -
Representation and Reality (1988)
"Hilary Putnam, who may have been the first philosopher to advance the notion that the computer is an apt model for the mind, takes a radically new view of his own theory of functionalism in this book." (MIT Press n.d.) Puntam makes the argument that the belief, reasoning, rationality, and knowledge that reside in the center of the philosophy of the mind, are simply too complex to be explained by the computational analogy.