-
Born
-
Return To America
Hilary Putnam grew up in France till his return in 1934. His father was a communist and Hilary grew up in a secular house hold despite his mother being Jewish. Putnam met Naom Chomsky in high school and the two were friends and intellectual opponents most of their life. -
College
Putnam studied at the University of Pennsylvania and received a BA in philosophy. He did graduate work at Harvard and eventualy earned his Ph. D at UCLA for his dissertation, The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences. -
Multiple Realizabilty
Putnam's most known work concerning the philosophy of the mind.
The notion states that, the same mental state or property can not be or reduced to physical states. Putnam, Hilary. "The nature of mental states." Art, mind, and religion (1967): 37-48. -
Actvism
From the 1960s through the 1970's Putnam was an Activist against the Vietnam war. Teaching Marxism and organizing his politics in the Progressive Labor Party. After 1972 Putnam severed his ties with the PLP. -
Semantic externalism
Putnam claim that in language, meaning of a word is not internal, but determined by the external factors the mind of an individual interprets.
Putnam, Hilary. "The meaning of ‘meaning’." Philosophical papers 2 (1975). -
President of APA
In 1976 Putnam was elected the president of the American Philosophical Association. -
Brain in a vat
Putnam's epistemology argument that clarifies his point for metaphysical realism. If there was a brain in a vat that was given information to the world by wires and a tv screen. The brain in the vat could only associate the world though the images it sees and not be able to understand the meaning of those images because it's definition of the world no matter what would be incoherent with its reality. Putnam, Hilary. "Brains in a vat." Knowledge: Critical Concepts 1 (2005): 192. -
Brain in a vat video
Wireless Philosophy, PHILOSOPHY- Epistemology: The Problem of Skepticism [HD] YOUTUBE, February 17, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqjdRAERWLc -
Rolf Schock Prize
Putnam won this award for his contributions to logic in 2011 -
Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy
Putnam won this award for his work in 2015 -
Death