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 2004 book, Ethics Without Ontology, deals with many of these topics. Some of Professor Putnam's more recent publications include:
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"The Depths and Shallows of Experience", in James D. Proctor (ed.), Science, Religion, and the Human Experience (Oxford, 2005): 71-86
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“After Gödel”, Logic Journal of the IGPL, vol. 14, no. 5 (October, 2006): 745-759.
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"A Philosophical Puzzle: Who was this guy Spinoza anyway?," review of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, by Rebecca Goldstein." The New York Observer (12/18/2006): 25
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"Philosophy as the Education of Grownups: Stanley Cavell and Skepticism", in Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (eds.), Reading Cavell (Routledge, 2006):117-128.
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Wittgenstein and the Real Numbers", in Alice Crary (ed), Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (MIT Press, 2007): 235-250.
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"Between Scylla and Charybdis: Does Dummett Have a Way Through?" in Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (Open Court, 2007): 155-167.
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“Capabilities and Two Ethical Theories”, in Journal of Human Development, Vol. 9, No. 3. (November, 2008): 377-388.
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Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (Indiana University, 2008)
There is an excellent on-line bibliography of Putnam's writings up to 2005: http://www.pragmatism.org/putnam.
Professor Putnam retired from the Department at the end of June 2000. |
