44 Facts About Hilary Putnam

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century.

Hilary Putnam made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science.

Hilary Putnam was known for his willingness to apply equal scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposed its flaws.

In epistemology, Hilary Putnam is known for his critique of the well-known "brain in a vat" thought experiment.

Hilary Putnam displayed an interest in metaphilosophy, seeking to "renew philosophy" from what he identified as narrow and inflated concerns.

Hilary Putnam was at times a politically controversial figure, especially for his involvement with the Progressive Labor Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was born on July 31,1926, in Chicago, Illinois.

Hilary Putnam's father, Samuel Putnam, was a scholar of Romance languages, columnist, and translator who wrote for the Daily Worker, a publication of the American Communist Party, from 1936 to 1946.

Hilary Putnam completed the first two years of his primary education in France before he and his parents returned to the US in 1933, settling in Philadelphia.

Hilary Putnam did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University and later at UCLA's philosophy department, where he received his Ph.

Hilary Putnam's dissertation supervisor Hans Reichenbach was a leading figure in logical positivism, the dominant school of philosophy of the day; one of Hilary Putnam's most consistent positions was his rejection of logical positivism as self-defeating.

In 1994, Hilary Putnam celebrated a belated bar mitzvah service; Ruth Anna's bat mitzvah was celebrated four years later.

Hilary Putnam became an official faculty advisor to the Students for a Democratic Society and in 1968 a member of the Progressive Labor Party.

Hilary Putnam was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.

Hilary Putnam permanently severed his relationship with the PLP in 1972.

Hilary Putnam said he had been impressed at first with the PLP's commitment to alliance-building and its willingness to attempt to organize from within the armed forces.

In 1976, Hilary Putnam was elected president of the American Philosophical Association.

Hilary Putnam continued to be forthright and progressive in his political views, as expressed in the articles "How Not to Solve Ethical Problems" and "Education for Democracy".

Hilary Putnam was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999.

Hilary Putnam retired from teaching in June 2000, becoming Cogan University Professor Emeritus, but as of 2009 continued to give a seminar almost yearly at Tel Aviv University.

Hilary Putnam held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2001.

Hilary Putnam's corpus includes five volumes of collected works, seven books, and more than 200 articles.

Hilary Putnam died at his home in Arlington, Massachusetts, on March 13,2016.

At the time of his death, Hilary Putnam was Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.

Hilary Putnam's most noted original contributions to that field came in several key papers published in the late 1960s that set out the hypothesis of multiple realizability.

Hilary Putnam cited examples from the animal kingdom to illustrate his thesis.

Hilary Putnam asked whether it was likely that the brain structures of diverse types of animals realize pain, or other mental states, the same way.

Hilary Putnam then took his argument a step further, asking about such things as the nervous systems of alien beings, artificially intelligent robots and other silicon-based life forms.

Hilary Putnam concluded that type-identity theorists had been making an "ambitious" and "highly implausible" conjecture that could be disproved by one example of multiple realizability.

Hilary Putnam formulated an a priori argument in favor of multiple realizability based on what he called "functional isomorphism".

Hilary Putnam himself put forth the first formulation of such a functionalist theory.

Hilary Putnam himself formulated one of the main arguments against functionalism: the Twin Earth thought experiment.

The philosopher of mind and language Donald Davidson, despite his many differences of opinion with Hilary Putnam, wrote that semantic externalism constituted an "anti-subjectivist revolution" in philosophers' way of seeing the world.

Hilary Putnam specifies a finite sequence of elements for the description of the meaning of every term in the language.

Since there is no limit to the number of such expressions to be considered, Hilary Putnam embraced a form of semantic holism.

Hilary Putnam held the view that mathematics, like physics and other empirical sciences, uses both strict logical proofs and "quasi-empirical" methods.

Hilary Putnam has contributed to scientific fields not directly related to his work in philosophy.

In computability theory, Hilary Putnam investigated the structure of the ramified analytical hierarchy, its connection with the constructible hierarchy and its Turing degrees.

Hilary Putnam showed that there are many levels of the constructible hierarchy that add no subsets of the integers.

In epistemology, Hilary Putnam is known for his argument against skeptical scenarios based on the "brain in a vat" thought experiment.

Hilary Putnam has clarified that his real target in this argument was never skepticism, but metaphysical realism, which he thought implied such skeptical scenarios were possible.

Hilary Putnam rejected this form of social constructivism, but retained the idea that there can be many correct descriptions of reality.

Hilary Putnam came to accept metaphysical realism in a broader sense, rejecting all forms of verificationism and all talk of our "making" the world.

Hilary Putnam discussed Jurgen Habermas's ideas, and wrote articles influenced by continental philosophy.