Hilary Putnam 1926 – 2016

Hilary Putnam was an American philosopher and one of the central figures of late twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Over a long career at Harvard he made foundational contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science, and changed his views often enough that his trajectory itself became a topic of philosophical study. He developed semantic externalism through the famous Twin Earth thought experiment, the functionalist account of mind that he later partially renounced, and an internal realism informed by his renewed engagement with American pragmatism. He was active in left politics throughout his career.

Hilary Putnam was born in 1926 in Chicago, the son of the Romance scholar and translator Samuel Putnam. He grew up between France and Philadelphia, took his bachelor's degree at Pennsylvania, and his doctorate at UCLA in 1951 under Hans Reichenbach. After teaching at Northwestern, Princeton, and MIT he was appointed to Harvard in 1965, where he held the Cogan University Professorship until his retirement.

His major works are gathered in three early Cambridge volumes of philosophical papers — Mathematics, Matter and Method (1975), Mind, Language and Reality (1975), and Realism and Reason (1983) — and continued through Reason, Truth and History (1981), Representation and Reality (1988), Renewing Philosophy (1992), Words and Life (1994), Ethics without Ontology (2004), and Philosophy in an Age of Science (2012). He was politically active in the New Left of the 1960s and in later life increasingly committed to Jewish religious practice.

Putnam's contributions touch nearly every area of analytic philosophy. The Twin Earth thought experiment and the slogan that meanings 'just ain't in the head' founded contemporary semantic externalism; multiple realizability shaped functionalism in the philosophy of mind; and his successive positions — scientific realism, internal realism, and a late commonsense realism akin to pragmatism — embodied an unusual willingness to revise his own views in print. He died at Arlington, Massachusetts in 2016.