Historical Figures Codexery

Hilary Putnam

American philosopher who changed positions through rigorous self-critique.

Hilary Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist born July 31, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois.[1][2]

Quick Facts

Region
Western philosophy
Era
20th-century philosophy
Birth name
Hilary Whitehall Putnam
Born
31 July 1926
Died
13 March 2016
Birthplace
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Place of death
Arlington, Massachusetts, U.S.
Spouse
Ruth Anna Putnam

Facts from the source article.

Life and work

Putnam taught at Northwestern University, Princeton University, and MIT before moving to Harvard, where he became Cogan University Professor.[3] Putnam was an active opponent of the Vietnam War and organized one of MIT's first anti-war committees in 1963.[4][5] He developed the causal theory of reference and formulated semantic externalism based on the Twin Earth thought experiment.[6][7] Putnam later abandoned metaphysical realism for a view he called "internal realism".[8]

Putnam pursued philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1951.[9] The year 1962 saw Putnam marry Ruth Anna Jacobs, a fellow philosopher who later taught at Wellesley College.[3] Putnam joined the Progressive Labor Party in 1968 and ended his association with them in 1972.[10][5] The Davis–Putnam algorithm for Boolean satisfiability was co-created by Putnam with Martin Davis, and he also contributed to proving Hilbert's tenth problem unsolvable.[11]

The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument in philosophy of mathematics was jointly formulated by Putnam and W. V. O. Quine.[12]

What the cited sources add

An obituary in The Guardian noted that Putnam transformed the philosophy of mind, language, metaphysics, and epistemology.[5] The Guardian obituary stated that Putnam organized one of the first faculty and student committees against the Vietnam war at MIT in 1963.[5] The Boston Globe reported that Ruth Anna Putnam was responsible for getting Hilary to take pragmatism seriously.[13] According to the same source, Putnam's initial academic positions were in mathematics and philosophy at Northwestern (1952-53), Princeton (1953-61), and MIT (1961-65).[5]

Putnam's "direct realism" seeks to bring metaphysics back to how individuals genuinely encounter the world, as described in a 2015 source.[14]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Casati, "Enciclopedia Garzanti della Filosofia", Garzanti Editori, 2004 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Baghramian, "Reading Putnam", Routledge, 2012, p. 1–16; Wolfe, "Strange Communists I Have Known", Stein and Day, 1965, p. 79; King, "One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers", Barron's, 2004, p. 170; Putnam, "The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam", Open Court, 2015; Baghramian, "Reading Putnam", Routledge, 2012, p. 1–16; Putnam, "The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam", Open Court, 2015 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  3. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Hickey, "Hilary Putnam", Continuum, 2009; O'Grady, "Hilary Putnam obituary", The Guardian, March 14, 2016; Marquard, "Ruth Anna Putnam, Wellesley College philosophy professor, dies at 91", Boston Globe, May 20, 2019; Wertheimer, L. K., "Finding My Religion", The Boston Globe, July 30, 2006 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Foley, "Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War", North Carolina Press, 2003, p. 5, 95–96; Hickey, "Hilary Putnam", Continuum, 2009; O'Grady, "Hilary Putnam obituary", The Guardian, March 14, 2016 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  5. O'Grady, "Hilary Putnam obituary", The Guardian, March 14, 2016. facts only, no text reused. theguardian.com
  6. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: King, "One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers", Barron's, 2004, p. 170; Ritchie, "TPM: Philosopher of the Month", June 2002; Casati, "Enciclopedia Garzanti della Filosofia", Garzanti Editori, 2004; LeDoux, "The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are", Viking Penguin, 2002; Horst, "Symbols and Computation A Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind", Minds and Machines, 1999, p. 347–381; "Reading Putnam", Blackwell, 1995 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Aranyosi, "The Peripheral Mind: Philosophy of Mind and the Peripheral Nervous System", Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 77–101; Rowlands, "Externalism About the Mind", Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, December 10, 2020 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  8. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Künne, "Conceptions of Truth", Clarendon Press, 2009; Sosa, "Putnam's Pragmatic Realism", The Journal of Philosophy, December 1993, p. 605–626; Putnam, "The Many Faces of Realism", Open Court, 1987 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  9. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Baghramian, "Reading Putnam", Routledge, 2012, p. 1–16; Putnam, "The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam", Open Court, 2015; Barsky, "Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent", MIT Press, 1997; King, "One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers", Barron's, 2004, p. 170; Hickey, "Hilary Putnam", Continuum, 2009; King, "One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers", Barron's, 2004, p. 170; Putnam, "The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences", Garland, 1990; Hi en.wikipedia.org
  10. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Hickey, "Hilary Putnam", Continuum, 2009; O'Grady, "Hilary Putnam obituary", The Guardian, March 14, 2016; "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter P", American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Foley, "Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War", North Carolina Press, 2003, p. 5, 95–96; Epps, "Faculty Will Vote on New Procedures for Discipline", The Harvard Crimson, April 14, 1971; Thomas, "Putnam Says Dunlop Threatens Radicals", The Harvard Crimson, May 28, 1971; "NYT correction, March 6, 2005", The New York Times, Mar en.wikipedia.org
  11. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Davis, "A computing procedure for quantification theory", Journal of the ACM, 1960, p. 201–215; Matiyesavic, "Hilbert's Tenth Problem", MIT, 1993 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  12. Wikipedia, "Hilary Putnam" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics", Spring 2019; Putnam, "Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings", Prentice-Hall, 1964; Putnam, "Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader", Oxford University Press, 1999; Putnam, "Realism with a Human Face", Harvard University Press, 1990 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  13. Marquard, "Ruth Anna Putnam, Wellesley College philosophy professor, dies at 91", Boston Globe, May 20, 2019. facts only, no text reused. bostonglobe.com
  14. Putnam, "What Wiki Doesn't Know About Me", Sardonic comment, October 30, 2015. facts only, no text reused. putnamphil.blogspot.com

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Hilary Putnam (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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