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Hilary Putnam July 31, 1926 - March 13, 2016
Hilary Putnam was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science, mathematics, and the philosophy of logic.
He is known for his semantic externalism, according to which linguistic meanings are not purely mental entities but reach out to external reality; his philosophy of mind; his defense of realism, and the view that truth and knowledge are objective. -
Hilary Putnam July 31, 1926 - March 13, 2016
At the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) he wrote a dissertation, under Hans Reichenbach, on the concept of probability, obtaining a Ph.D. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cG3sfrK5B4E -
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Hilary Putnam July 31, 1926 - March 13, 2016
He joined the philosophy department at Harvard and retired as a professor. Also, Putnam's idea is "The question of the autonomy of our mental life…has nothing to do with that all too popular…question about matter or soul-stuff. We could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn’t matter". Putnam drew an analogy between human mentality and computers, which have hardware (the brain) and software (the mind) that are likewise disjoint. -
Hilary Putnam July 31, 1926 - March 13, 2016
He taught philosophy at Northwestern University, Princeton University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) until 1976. -
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Hilary Putnam July 31, 1926 - March 13, 2016
In his later years, he became increasingly sensitive to the moral aspects of epistemology, and metaphysics.