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Early Life
Hilary Putnam was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 31st, 1926. His father was an avid communist and even worked for a communist news article. He attended multiple universities for mathematics and philosophy, namely the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the Unversity of California. During his time at the University of California, he wrote a dissertation on probability as a student under Hans Reichenbach. -
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Harvard Professor
For 35 years Putnam taught as a professor at Harvard University up until the year 2000. During his time at Harvard, he was the president of multiple associations namely the American Philosophical Society, the Philosophy of Science Association and the Association for Symbolic Logic. He was a well-respected professor and was very political. He would often express his views against the Vietnam war and organized one of the first events at Harvard against it. -
Putnam's view on Realism "Realism and Reason"
Putnam was constantly revisiting and updating his previous works, namely when he started to criticize "Metaphysical Realism" and instead endorsed "Internal Realism" his view on the subject evolved gradually through the years and overrode the differences between the two. He wrote about this subject in his third philosophical paper published in 1975. -
A short video on Hilary Putnam
In this video, Putnam is discussing the nature of science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4HQZrOeZ7E -
Late Life
Hilary Putnam was luckily around during the 2010s, he would give seminars regularly at Tel Aviv University. He received numerous awards for his contributions towards philosophy during his life. Sadly Putnam died on March 13th, 2016 at his home in Arlington, Massachusetts. His cause of death was a rare form of lung cancer otherwise known as mesothelioma.