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Hilary Putman (born July 31, 1926, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died March 13, 2016)

By Jess Taylor

  • Earning his Ph.D

    Putnam earned his Ph.D in 1951 at UCLA for his dissertation, The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences. He studied areas such as mathematics, philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics

  • Important works

    Putnam produced many important works such as The Meaning of "Meaning" that explored life if there were a twin earth.

  • 1980's Brain in a vat

    Putnam was well known for his epistemology and his thoughts about the brain in a vat thought experiment. He argued that no one can coherently suspect that one is disembodied brain in a vat put there by a mad scientist.

  • Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy

    Hilary Putnam was awarded The Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 2011 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.