Department of Philosophy

Professor Emeritus
Hilary Putnam
Cogan University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy

Hilary W. Putnam was born in Chicago in 1926. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a well-known author and translator. Putnam's parents lived in France until 1934, and then in Philadelphia, where he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in 1951 from UCLA, where he worked with Hans Reichenbach. Before joining the faculty of Harvard, he was Professor of the Philosophy of Science at M.I.T. He has also taught at Northwestern University and Princeton University. He is a past President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), the Philosophy of Science Association, and the Association for Symbolic Logic. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and the French Academie des Sciences Politiques et Morales, and holds a number of honorary degrees.

Putnam has written extensively on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. In recent years Putnam has also written extensively on the relations between scientific and non-scientific knowledge and on American pragmatism. His most recent book, titled Ethics Without Ontology, which appeared in Spring 2004, deals with many of these topics.

Professor Putnam retired from the Department at the end of June 2000.