The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam, who turned 88 in 2014, is one of the world’s greatest living philosophers. He currently holds the position of Cogan University Professor Emeritus of Harvard. He has been called “one of the 20th century’s true philosophic giants” (by Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson in Prospect magazine). He has been very influential in several different areas of philosophy: philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. This volume in the prestigious Library of Living Philosophers series contains 26 chapters original to this work, each written by a well-known philosopher, including the late Richard Rorty and the late Michael Dummett. The volume also includes Putnam’s reply to each of the 26 critical and descriptive essays, which cover the broad range of Putnam’s thought. They are organized thematically into the following parts: Philosophy and Mathematics, Logic and Language, Knowing and Being, Philosophy of Practice, and Elements of Pragmatism. Readers also appreciate the extensive intellectual autobiography.

Randall E. Auxier, editor of the Library of Living Philosophers from 2001 to 2013, is a professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and the general editor of The Works of Josiah Royce. He is author of Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce (2013). He edited Responses to Royce (2000) and has coedited many volumes, including The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto (2013) and The Philosophy of Richard Rorty. He lives in Carbondale, IL.

Douglas R. Anderson is an editor of the Library of Living Philosophers and a professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the author of Philosophy and Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture (2006) and Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce (1995). He is the former editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy and the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. He lives in Carbondale, IL.

The late Lewis Edwin Hahn was an editor of the Library of Living Philosophers from 1981 to 2001. As Paul Schilpp's successor he edited three volumes in the series with Dr. Schilpp and eight volumes as sole editor, then conceived, planned, and began the creation of seven more volumes. He authored A Contextualistic Theory of Perception (1942), Value: A Cooperative Inquiry (with John Dewey and others, 1949), and A Contextualistic World View (2001). Dr. Hahn co-edited The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898 (1967-1972) and wrote numerous articles for scholarly journals and collections.