Hilary Putnam | Biography

One of the most influential American philosophers of the post-World War II generation, Hilary Putnam has also been one of the most prolific. His corpus includes fifteen books and more than two hundred articles ranging over philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic and mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. His original contributions include one of the first attempts to compare the mind to a computer, the development of a "quantum logic," a comprehensive theory of meaning for natural languages, arguments for and against various kinds of realism, and a thoroughgoing critique of the materialistic outlook that was characteristic of most American philosophers during the latter half of the twentieth century. Richard Rorty, another influential philosopher of Putnam's generation, compared him in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) to the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, "not just in intellectual curiosity and willingness to change his...
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