Hilary Putnam

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Hilary Whitehall Putnam (July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, as well as a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century.

He made important contributions to the philosophy of mind, literary theory, philosophy of mathematics, and science philosophy.

Putnam worked on philosophy and computer science.

He developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability issue with Martin Davis and helped solve Hilbert's tenth problem. Hilbert's tenth problem was unsolvable, and he pioneered rigorous inquiry before finding its flaws.

As a result, he became known for often shifting his own position.

Putnam is best known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on his belief that the mental, as well as the notion of functionalism, an influential theory of the mind–body problem.

Life

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 31, 1926. Samuel Putnam's father, a Romance language scholar, columnist, and translator who wrote for the American Communist Party's journal from 1936 to 1946. Putnam's father was Jewish, but his mother, Riva, was Catholic, owing to his father's commitment to communism. The family moved to France in early 1927, six months after Hilary's birth, where Samuel was contracted to translate the family's surviving works of François Rabelais. Putnam wrote an autobiographical essay in 2015 that the first memories he had from his childhood in France, and that his first language was French.

Putnam completed the first two years of his primary education in France before returning to the United States in 1933, settling in Philadelphia. He attended Central High School, where he met Noam Chomsky, who was a year behind him. 8 For the remainder of Putnam's life, the two remained allies—and often intellectual critics. Putnam earned his B.A. in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, studying philosophy. A degree in Philomathean Society, the country's oldest continuously operating collegiate literary society. He did graduate work in philosophy and later in UCLA's philosophy department, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1951 for his dissertation, The Meaning of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences. Putnam's dissertation supervisor Hans Reichenbach was a leader figure in logical positivism, the day's most influential school of philosophy; one of Putnam's most influential positions was his rejection of logical positivism as self-defeating. Putnam became his own philosophical critic over the course of his life, shifting his focus on philosophical issues and criticizing his previous beliefs.

Putnam taught at Northwestern University (1951–51), Princeton University (1953–61), and MIT (1961–65). Ruth Anna Putnam (born Ruth Anna Jacobs), who took up teaching at Wellesley College in 1962, married him. The Putnams decided to create a traditional Jewish home for their children, after rebelling against antisemitism in their youth. Since they had no familiarity with Judaism's traditions, they sought invitations to other Jewish homes for Seder. They began to study Jewish rituals and Hebrew, became more interested in Judaism, self-identified as Jews, and regularly practiced Judaism. Hilary's 1994 bar mitzvah service was held; Ruth Anna's bat mitzvah was commemorated four years later.

Putnam, a member of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, was also a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. In 1963, he founded one of MIT's first faculty and student anti-war committees. Since heading to Harvard in 1965, he organized campus demonstrations and began teaching Marxism. Putnam served as a National Student Adviser and a founding member of the Progressive Labor Party in 1968. In 1965, he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 1968, his political efforts were mainly based on the PLP. The Harvard administration found these activities disruptive and threatened to censure Putnam. Putnam's PLP membership was put into jeopardy in 1972. He called his PLP membership in 1997, at a meeting of former draft resistance campaigners at Boston's Arlington Street Church, a mistake. He said he was impressed by the PLP's dedication to alliance-building and its willingness to mobilize from within the armed forces.

Putnam was elected president of the American Philosophical Association in 1976. In recognition of his contributions to the philosophy of logic and mathematics, Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Mathematical Logic was named next year. Putnam never said that academics have a particular social and moral obligation to society, despite his radical history. He continued to be forthright and progressive in his political views, as shown in the books "How Not to Solve Ethical Issues" (1983) and "Education for Democracy" (1993).

Putnam was a Correspondent Fellow of the British Academy. In 1999, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He stopped teaching in June 2000 and became Cogan University Professor Emeritus, but Tel Aviv University Professor Emeritus as of 2009. In 2001, he was appointed to the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Five volumes of collected works, seven books, and more than 200 articles have been published in his collection. Putnam's rediscovered interest in Judaism prompted him to write several books and essays on the topic. He co-authored several papers and a book on the late-19th-century American pragmatist movement, with his wife.

Putnam was given the Rolf Schock Prize in 2011 and the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systemic Philosophy in 2015 for his contributions to philosophy and logic. Putnam died in Arlington, Massachusetts, on March 13, 2016. Putnam, a Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University at the time of his death, was a Harvard University Professor Emeritus.

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