Abstract
It is traditional in volumes such as this – especially volumes appearing relatively soon after the death of their subject – to include a lengthy, and often rather dry and boring, intellectual biography. In the case of Putnam, such an essay would not, in fact, be boring (although, given the richness of Putnam’s life, such an essay might have to be rather lengthy!) But we wanted to do something a little different, and at any rate we knew we couldn’t do a better job at biography than what is already in the gripping intellectual autobiography Putnam wrote for his installment in the Library of Living Philosophers series (Auxier et al. 2015).
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Notes
- 1.
Although Putnam’s mother was Jewish, his childhood was secular and he only rediscovered Judaism when his son requested a Bar Mizvah.
- 2.
Although he was born in America in 1926, his family lived in and around Paris during his early childhood and he only learned English upon their return to the United States in 1933.
- 3.
Putnam was a childhood friend of these literary luminaries in the sense that, as a young child, he often sat on their laps or interacted with them in other ways when they were visiting his father Samuel Putnam, a translator and writer!
- 4.
Seriously – if you are interested in a detailed account of both Putnam’s intellectual work and his extremely interesting life, you really should read the autobiographical essay. It’s amazing!
- 5.
Warren Goldfarb is Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic at Harvard University.
- 6.
A the time of writing this essay Bahram Assadian had just completed his PhD in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.
- 7.
Michael Lynch is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut - Storrs.
- 8.
Martin Davis is Emeritus Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
- 9.
Akihiro Kanamori is Professor of Mathematics at Boston University.
- 10.
Timothy McCarthy is Professor of Linguistics and of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
- 11.
Karine Chemla is a Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and Bruno Belhoste is Professor and Director of the Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (IHMC) at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1).
References
Auxier, R., Anderson, D., & Hahn, L. (2015). The philosophy of Hilary Putnam: library of living philosophers (Vol. 34). Chicago: Open Court.
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Cook, R.T., Hellman, G. (2018). Memories of Hilary Putnam. In: Hellman, G., Cook, R. (eds) Hilary Putnam on Logic and Mathematics. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96274-0_1
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