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“... text is dotted here with ‘Quine is guilty of confusing ...’, ‘Quine’s sloppy use’, ‘Putnam makes some attempt to pretend ...’, and so on. These sections are unusually irritating in their condescension to the dominant writers in the field, and whole chapters are made difficult to read by the annoyance that this tone produces. Quine’s views ...”

“... anti-Cartesians in chronological order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still ...”

“... the scope of the theory by treating the attachment of words to things as a part of human life. Hilary Putnam has reviewed Ayer’s Philosophy in the 20th Century against this background in a recent issue of Partisan Review. The pattern is complex but the main lines are easily discernible. Russell is one point of origin for contemporary analytic ...”

“... well, or so Ayers argues. Here he is taking on the recently fashionable notions of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. Those are formidable opponents, but Locke is a staunch ally. His central analytical concepts of mode and substance are rather carefully tailored to much common experience which we still have, science or no. The most that Ayers will grant is ...”

“... pathology Z in terms of the theories of reference advocated a quarter of a century ago by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke. Kripke and Putnam would call ‘schizophrenia’ a natural-kind term, if indeed this is a kind of illness that exists in nature. Putnam presents the ...”

“... however, other recent commentators on Foucault will need more persuasion. Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam, for instance, maintains in Reason, Truth and History (1981) that Foucault is a relativist, and that relativism is logically unintelligible. Much like Habermas, Putnam thinks we must (for logical ...”

“... all and sundry, and marvel at his arrogant jokes. His contempt for fashion, for instance: has Hilary Putnam led the American Philosophical Association in a public condemnation of organs such as the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly for publishing the ‘unfounded’, ‘racist, sexist and anti-working-class theories of Richard ...”

“... of neural process that could even correspond to the “perception of a mathematical object”,’ Hilary Putnam once observed. One way out of this dilemma is to throw over Plato for Aristotle. There may be no perfect mathematical entities in our world, but there are plenty of imperfect approximations. We can draw crude circles and lines on a ...”

“... of the word ‘paradigm’, and nothing in this book has persuaded me otherwise (the philosopher Hilary Putnam, who contributes an interesting preface, describes how new theories are continually claiming to represent ‘Copernican Revolutions’ in their discipline, and warns that ‘we would be in a better position to determine what is and is not a ...”

“... contribution – the uniformly distinguished contributors include John Rawls, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, Ayer and Hampshire – is prefaced by a quite excellent editorial essay which makes available even to beginners work at the very frontiers of the discipline. But what this anthologising approach omits is also important. The ...”

“... is not that wizardry always helps, only that what helps is not to be sneered at. Some years ago, Hilary Putnam, seeking to interest analytic philosophers in the pragmatism they have no great regard for, drew their attention to the importance of being ‘both fallibilistic and antisceptical’. By ‘fallibilism’ he means the claim that ‘there is ...”

“... among possible worlds. A quick example will show how this is supposed to work. Some years ago, Hilary Putnam raised the following question, which analytic philosophy has been gnawing at ever since. Suppose somebody discovered a sort of stuff that is, to casual inspection, just like water (it’s wet, it’s clear and potable, it freezes at zero ...”

“... come under increasing attack from very different quarters, most notably in the writings of Hilary Putnam, a philosopher of unimpeachable technical accomplishment. Throughout these essays, Cavell worries aloud about how his hopes for philosophy can be met in the institutional practice of philosophy, more specifically about whether directions to ...”

“... advanced by Saul Kripke a couple of years ago. In a new foreword to this fourth edition, Hilary Putnam mentions the parallel, but does not develop it. It is important because a formally identical argument is put to subtly different uses in the two books. Both show that similarities between the known and the unknown cannot be invoked ...”

“... any effort to think these questions through. This puts him in the company of philosophers like Hilary Putnam who have argued against the kind of drastic dualism that sees only hard factual knowledge, on the one hand, and mere subjective ‘values’, on the other. Criticism has been bedevilled by such false dichotomies, Selden argues, since Mill made ...”