Hilary Putnam. Biografia

Hilary Putnam nasce a Chicago il 31 luglio 1926. Si forma alla scuola di Quine e Reichenbach. Nel 1965 insegna filosofia alla Harvard University , dove, dal 1976 è Walter Beverly Pearson Professor di Matematica e logica matematica.

Hilary W. Putnam was born in Chicago in 1926. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a well-known author and translator. Putnam 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. He has taught at Northwestern and Princeton, and was Professor of the Philosophy of Science at MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard. He is now the Cogan University Professor in the Department of Philosophy.
Professor Putnam is a past president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
He has written extensively on the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of natural science, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. Many of his papers have been collected in three volumes of Philosophical Papers, in Realism with a Human Face , and in Words and Life. He is also the author of a number of books, including most recently Renewing Philosophy and Pragmatism.
Professor Putnam has developed a position on the nature of truth and justification which he calls "internal realism," or more recently, "pragmatic realism," which has become a widely discussed alternative to both traditional metaphysical kinds of realism and post-modernist scepticism. In recent years, his interests have centered on the relations between scientific and non-scientific knowledge.

Professor Putnam retired from the Department at the end of June 2000

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