Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of Mathematics, Matter and Mind and Mind, Language and Reality. His new book, Reason, Truth and History, will be reviewed in a later issue of this journal.

Letter

Misrepresenting

2 December 1993

Colin McGinn’s review of Renewing Philosophy (LRB, 2 December 1993) is in content not a book review, but a polemic, and as such requires a response. It is a major misrepresentation that I attack all of analytic philosophy (let alone all of philosophy) as being ‘scientistic’, as McGinn suggests. McGinn asks a rhetorical question: ‘Does he believe that traditional ontology and epistemology are...
Letter
SIR: John McDowell’s (Letters, 7 July) and Julia Jack’s (Letters, 21 July) comments on my review of Varieties of Reference by Gareth Evans raise important issues. Before speaking to these, let me first say something about McDowell’s more lively accusations. I am accused of ‘not understanding’ the ‘point’ of Evans’s theoretical construction and of ‘withholding approval’ from its...

C’est mon métier

Jerry Fodor, 24 January 2013

It would take at least two workaday philosophers to keep up with Hilary Putnam. Philosophy in an Age of Science is a case in point. It’s a collection of papers, most of them previously...

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A Science of Tuesdays

Jerry Fodor, 20 July 2000

Hilary Putnam’s latest book collects two series of his lectures with two chapters of ‘afterwords’. Subsidiary topics go by faster than my eye was able to follow, but the main...

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In and out of the mind

Colin McGinn, 2 December 1993

In a neglected passage in The Problems of Philosophy Bertrand Russell unapologetically writes: A priori knowledge is not all of the logical kind we have been hitherto considering. Perhaps the...

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Terrestrial Thoughts, Extraterrestrial Science

Bernard Williams, 7 February 1991

There is a wonderful passage in Nietzsche’s Daybreak, about the ageing philosopher. ‘Subject to the illusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, he passes judgment on the work and...

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Putnam’s Change of Mind

Ian Hacking, 4 May 1989

Big issues and little issues: among established working philosophers there is none more gifted at making us think anew about both than Hilary Putnam. His latest book is motivated by large...

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Life at the end of inquiry

Richard Rorty, 2 August 1984

In theory, it is the highest virtue of the philosopher to be constantly receptive to criticism, always willing to abandon his own views upon hearing a better argument. In practice, students tend...

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Microcosm and Macrocosm

David Pears, 3 June 1982

There is an odd experience that Plato may have had. If light filters into a room through a small enough aperture, anything moving on the street outside will cast its shadow on the ceiling and...

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