James Conant

Sanjit Chakraborty

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. As student of Rudolph Carnap's and Hans Reichenbach's, he went on to become not only a major figure in North American analytic philosophy, who made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics, and physics but also to the disciplines of logic, number theory, and computer science. He passed away on March 13, 2016. The present volume is a memorial to his extraordinary intellectual contributions, honoring his contributions as a philosopher, a thinker, and a public intellectual. It features essays by an international team of leading philosophers, covering all aspects of Hilary Putnam's philosophy from his work in ethics and the history of philosophy to his contributions to the philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics. Each essay is an original contribution. “Hilary Putnam is one of the most distinguished philosophers of the modern era, and just speaking personally, one of the smartest and most impressive thinkers I have ever been privileged to know—as a good friend for 70 years. The fine essays collected here are a fitting tribute to a most remarkable figure.” Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “In Engaging Putnam excellent philosophers engage the writings and ideas of Hilary Putnam, one of the most productive and influential philosophers of the last century. Putnam stands out because of the combination of brilliance and a firm grasp of reality he brought to a very broad range of issues: the logic and the philosophy of mathematics, free-will, skepticism, realism, internalism and externalism and a lot more. Along with this he offered penetrating insights about other great philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. All great philosophers make us think. With many, we try to figure out the strange things they say. With Putnam, we are made to think about clearly explained examples and arguments that get to the heart of the issues he confronts. This book is a wonderful contribution to the continuation of Putnam-inspired thinking.” John Perry, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

Engaging Putnam

This book explores the internalism/externalism debate inherent in ontology and semantics from the point of view of phenomenology. The debate centres around whether or not the world bears a constitutive relation with the mind. Are meanings of terms to be found inside the head (intrinsic) or in the outside world (external)? The book elegantly introduces a way of resolving such queries, attending them from a range of perspectives, including the theory of description, the causal theory of reference, mental content, self-knowledge, first person perspective, being-in-the-world, and socio-linguistic background, among others. It thus presents a critical overview on the seminal works of prominent thinkers like Frege, Putnam, Searle, Fodor, Jackson, Block, Davidson, Quine, and Bilgrami. It begins by highlighting the groundwork of the theory of meaning and mind, and explores the location of content from the perspectives of the causal theory of reference and descriptivism. It then investigates how meaning theory represents the world and the mind in the contemporary debate, before looking at this debate from the philosophy of language and metaphysics standpoints. It finishes with an investigation of how internalism and externalism can be combined from the perspectives of holism and phenomenology. The book’s approach is distinctive in the sense that it formulates a reconciliation between both sides of this ongoing debate by inventing an Internalistic-externalism view from the perspectives of analytic trends and continental philosophy. It will be of interest not only to professional philosophers, linguists, researchers and graduates in the field, but also to the reader wishing to learn more about the mind-world relationship.

Sanjit Chakraborty

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