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Articles

Hilary Putnam on Realism, Truth & Reason

Putnam is one of today’s leading living philosophers. He has changed his ideas repeatedly on some central philosophical problems including the nature of truth. Christopher Norris tells the story so far.

Hilary Putnam (born 1926) is a Harvard-based philosopher whose work has ranged widely over topics in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science, language, logic and mathematics. Just recently he has extended his scope yet further into ethics, politics and religion, as well as certain regions where most of his colleagues would fear or disdain to tread, like literary theory and so-called ‘continental’ (post-war mainland-European) philosophy. Indeed Putnam stands out for this exceptional catholicity of interests at a time when so much philosophical work in the English-speaking world has become highly focused on matters of narrowly technical concern.

Putnam is also unusual in his willingness to constantly revisit his own earlier arguments and – very often – to come up with misgivings or objections which he takes to require a more-or-less drastic change of approach. This tendency can perhaps be traced back to his formative years in the late 1940s and early 50s, when Putnam was greatly influenced by the doctrines of the Logical Positivists, especially through the work of Rudolf Carnap.

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