Putnam, Hilary (1926–2016)

1. Life

Born in Chicago in 1926 as the only child of Rivka and Samuel Putnam, Hilary Putnam spent his early years in France. His father was a well-known writer and translator, an active communist, and a columnist for the Daily Worker. Along with Noam Chomsky, Putnam majored in the emerging field of linguistic analysis at the University of Pennsylvania (and also in philosophy and German). His graduate studies were divided between Harvard, where he studied with Quine, Hao Wang, C.I. Lewis and Morton White, and UCLA, where he completed his Ph.D. dissertation on the concept of probability under the supervision of Reichenbach in 1951 (1990b). In 1953 he moved to Princeton, made the acquaintance of Carnap and, receiving informal instruction from Kreisel, worked intensively on mathematical logic. He held teaching posts at Northwestern University, Princeton University and MIT, and at Harvard from 1965 until his retirement in 2000 (Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic 1976-1995 and John Cogan University Professor of Humanities, 1995-2000). In the 1960s, Putnam actively protested against the Vietnam War, and was also active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and The Progressive Labour Party, a Maoist group. Around 1972 he became disillusioned with communism. Since Putnam saw his early realism as embodying some of Engels’ insights, it seems plausible that this turn affected his philosophical development. He later became both personally and professionally interested in his Jewish heritage. He received many honorary degrees and awards, among them the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy (2011), the Lauener Prize for an Outstanding Oeuvre in Analytical Philosophy (2012) and the Nicolas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy (2015). He is survived by his wife philosopher Ruth Anna Putnam and his four children.