Putnam, Hilary(1926–)
Hilary Putnam, after receiving a BA from Pennsylvania (1948) and a year spent at Harvard (1948–1949), studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, taking his doctorate in 1951 with a dissertation titled "The Concept of Probability: An Application to Finite Sequences." He taught at Northwestern (1952–1953), Princeton (1953–1961) and MIT (1961–1965), becoming Walter Beverly Pearson professor at Harvard in 1965. From 1995 to 2000, he served as Cogan University Professor there, becoming emeritus in 2000. He has been influential in most areas of philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of language, of logic, of mathematics, and of science.
Putnam is sometimes thought of as often changing his mind. (See, for example, the Dictionary of Philosophers' Names.) Sometimes he has. But in central respects he has held a single, though developing, position since the mid-1950s, a position that in some aspects resembles the later Ludwig Wittgenstein's. This entry sets out some constant central themes.
Putnam was among those American philosophers to benefit directly from the intellectual exodus from Europe caused by Nazism. He was a student of Rudolf Carnap and of Hans Reichenbach. Though his approach to issues is quite different from theirs, Reichenbach in particular had a lasting and often acknowledged influence on Putnam's thought.
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