-
Hilary Putnam's Day of Birth
Hilary Putnam was born on July 31st, 1926 in Chicago, IL. Putnam has contributed many things into the realm of philosophy. -
Putnams's Education
Hilary went to school in various places such as; University of Pennsylvania studying mathematics and philosophy, attended graduate school at Harvard and UCLA studying philosophy then obtaining his PhD at UCLA in 1951 -
Antiwar Movement
Putnam was heavily immersed in the 1960s on the antiwar movement involving the Vietnam War. It is said "he was active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and in the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist group, but by the early 1970s he had become disillusioned with far-left political ideology". -
Putnam's teaching history
He has taught at The University of Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which ended in 1971 -
Putnam's Publishing's
Hilary Putnam publish a book on his conception of meaning called "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" in 1975 explaining how meanings are not just a said "thought" but much more than that which created the conception called "semantic externalism" -
Putnam's Experiment
Along with his publishing of "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" Putnam created an experiment called "Twin Earth" to further validate his theory. An example of the theory is "although the beliefs and images associated with the word water on Twin Earth are identical to those associated with water on Earth (e.g., the inhabitants of both planets believe that -
Putnam's Experiment Cont.
“water is the clear liquid that fills the oceans, lakes, and rivers and falls as rain”), the term differs in meaning on the two planets because the substance it refers to on Earth differs from the substance it refers to on Twin Earth". -
Putnam's philosophy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWNjTnAB8ac
as well "the most-pronounced change occurred in 1976, when he launched an attack on the view he called “metaphysical realism,” recommending that “internal realism” be adopted in its stead (see below Varieties of realism)" -
Possible shift in Putnam's philosophical thinking
"These are just some of the many indications of a shift in Putnam’s philosophical sensibilities. Although he remained an active philosopher of science, keeping abreast of the latest developments in areas such as the foundations of quantum mechanics, he became increasingly critical of scientism, the view that all knowledge is scientific." Which is currently found in his writing "Realism with a Human Face" written in 1990 -
After Putnam's initial teaching
Putnam had moved into Harvard's philosophy department and retired as said "Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard in 2000" -
Hilary Putnam's Day of Death
Hilary Putnam died recently on March 16th of 2016.
