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Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science.〔Casati R., "Hillary Putnam" in ''Enciclopedia Garzanti della Filosofia'', ed. Gianni Vattimo. 2004. Garzanti Editori. Milan. ISBN 88-11-50515-1〕 He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws.〔King, P.J. ''One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers''. Barron's 2004, p. 170.〕 As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position. Putnam is currently Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on his hypothesis of the multiple realizability of the mental, and for the concept of functionalism, an influential theory regarding the mind–body problem.〔 In philosophy of language, along with Saul Kripke and others, he developed the causal theory of reference, and formulated an original theory of meaning, introducing the notion of semantic externalism based on a famous thought experiment called Twin Earth.〔P. Clark-B. Hale (eds.), "Reading Putnam", Blackwell, Cambridge (Massachusetts)-Oxford 1995.〕 In philosophy of mathematics, he and his mentor W. V. Quine developed the "Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis", an argument for the reality of mathematical entities,〔Colyvan, Mark, ("Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics" ), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)〕 later espousing the view that mathematics is not purely logical, but "quasi-empirical".〔Putnam, H. ''Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings''. Edited with Paul Benacerraf. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964. 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.〕 In the field of epistemology, he is known for his critique of the well known "brain in a vat" thought experiment. This thought experiment appears to provide a powerful argument for epistemological skepticism, but Putnam challenges its coherence.〔Putnam, H. (1981): ("Brains in a vat" ) in ''Reason, Truth, and History'', Cambridge University Press; reprinted in DeRose and Warfield, editors (1999): ''Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader'', Oxford UP.〕 In metaphysics, he originally espoused a position called metaphysical realism, but eventually became one of its most outspoken critics, first adopting a view he called "internal realism",〔Putnam, H. ''Realism with a Human Face''. Edited by James Conant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.〕 which he later abandoned. Despite these changes of view, throughout his career he remained committed to scientific realism, roughly the view that mature scientific theories are approximately true descriptions of ways things are.〔Putnam, H. 2012. From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again. In his (Au.), De Caro, M. and Macarthur D. (Eds.) "Philosophy in an Age of Science". Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.〕 In the philosophy of perception Putnam came to endorse direct realism, according to which perceptual experiences directly present one with the external world. In the past, he further held that there are no mental representations, sense data, or other intermediaries that stand between the mind and the world.〔Putnam, H.. ''The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World''. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.〕 By 2012, however, he rejected this further commitment, in favor of "transactionalism", a view that accepts both that perceptual experiences are world-involving transactions, and that these transactions are functionally describable (provided that worldly items and intentional states may be referred to in the specification of the function). Such transactions can further involve qualia.〔http://putnamphil.blogspot.com/2014/10/what-wiki-doesnt-know-about-me-in-1976.html〕〔Putnam, H. 2012. How to Be a Sophisticated "Naive Realist". In his (Au.), De Caro, M. and Macarthur D. (Eds.) "Philosophy in an Age of Science". Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.〕 In his later work, Putnam has become increasingly interested in American pragmatism, Jewish philosophy, and ethics, thus engaging with a wider array of philosophical traditions. He has also displayed an interest in metaphilosophy, seeking to "renew philosophy" from what he identifies as narrow and inflated concerns. Outside philosophy, Putnam has contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem〔Davis, M. and Putnam, H. "A computing procedure for quantification theory" in ''Journal of the ACM'', 7:201–215, 1960.〕 and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem. He has been at times a politically controversial figure, especially for his involvement with the Progressive Labor Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.〔To appear in the "American Philosophers" edition of ''Literary Biography'', ed. Bruccoli, Layman and Clarke〕 == Personal life == Putnam was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1926. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a scholar of Romance languages, columnist and translator who wrote for the ''Daily Worker'', a publication of the American Communist Party, from 1936 to 1946 (when he became disillusioned with communism).〔Wolfe, Bertram David. "Strange Communists I Have Known", Stein and Day, 1965, p.79.〕 As a result of his father's commitment to communism, Putnam had a secular upbringing, although his mother, Riva, was Jewish.〔 The family lived in France until 1934, when they returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia.〔 Putnam attended Central High School; there he met Noam Chomsky, who was a year behind him. The two have been friends—and often intellectual opponents—ever since.〔Robert F. Barsky, ''Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent'', (Ch. 2: Undergraduate Years. "A Very Powerful Personality" ), MIT Press, 1997〕 Putnam studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his BA (undergraduate degree) and becoming a member of the Philomathean Society, one of the oldest collegiate literary societies in the U.S.〔〔 He went on to do graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University,〔 and later at UCLA's Philosophy Department, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951 for a dissertation entitled "The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences". Putnam's teacher Hans Reichenbach (his dissertation supervisor) was a leading figure in logical positivism, the dominant school of philosophy of the day; one of Putnam's most consistent positions has been his rejection of logical positivism as self-defeating.〔 After briefly teaching at Northwestern, Princeton, and MIT, he moved to Harvard in 1965 with his wife, Ruth Anna Jacobs, who took a teaching position in philosophy at Wellesley College.〔 Hilary and Ruth Anna were married in 1962. Ruth Anna Jacobs, descendant of a family with a long scholarly tradition in Gotha (her ancestor was the German classical scholar Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs), was born in Berlin, Germany,〔Hortsch, Michael. "Dr. Hans Nathan Kohn – ein Berliner Jüdischer Arzt und Forscher am Vorabend des Nationalsozialismus." Berlin Medical, Vol. 4:26–28 August 2007〕 in 1927 to anti-Nazi political-activist parents and, like Putnam himself, she was raised an atheist (her mother was Jewish and her father had been from a Christian background).〔 The Putnams, rebelling against the anti-Semitism that they had experienced during their youth, decided to establish a traditional Jewish home for their children.〔 Since they had no experience with the rituals of Judaism, they sought out invitations to other Jews' homes for Seder. They had "no idea how to do it ()", in the words of Ruth Anna. They therefore began to study Jewish ritual and Hebrew, and became more Jewishly interested, identified, and active. In 1994, Hilary Putnam celebrated a belated Bar Mitzvah service. His wife had a Bat Mitzvah service four years later.〔 Hilary was a popular teacher at Harvard. In keeping with the family tradition, he was politically active.〔 In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was an active supporter of civil rights causes and an opponent of American military intervention in Vietnam.〔 In 1963, he organized one of the first faculty and student committees at MIT against the war. Putnam was disturbed when he learned from reading the reports of David Halberstam that the U.S. was "defending" South Vietnamese peasants from the Vietcong by poisoning their rice crops.〔 After moving to Harvard in 1965, he organized campus protests and began teaching courses on Marxism. Hilary became an official faculty advisor to the Students for a Democratic Society and, in 1968, became a member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).〔 He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterP.pdf )〕 After 1968, his political activities were centered on the PLP.〔 The Harvard administration considered these activities disruptive and attempted to censure Putnam, but two other faculty members criticized the procedures.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=356092 )〕 Putnam permanently severed his ties with the PLP in 1972. In 1997, at a meeting of former draft resistance activists at Arlington Street Church in Boston, Putnam described his involvement with the PLP as a mistake. He said that he had been impressed at first with PLP's commitment to alliance-building, and its willingness to attempt to organize from within the armed forces.〔 In 1976, he was elected President of the American Philosophical Association. The following year, he was selected as Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Mathematical Logic, in recognition of his contributions to philosophy of logic and mathematics.〔 While breaking with his radical past, Putnam has never abandoned his belief that academics have a particular social and ethical responsibility toward society. He has continued to be forthright and progressive in his political views, as expressed in the articles "How Not to Solve Ethical Problems" (1983) and "Education for Democracy" (1993).〔 Putnam is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He retired from teaching in June 2000, but, as of 2009, he still gives a seminar almost yearly at Tel Aviv University. He also held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2001.〔http://www.uva.nl/en/disciplines/philosophy/home/components-centrecolumn/the-spinoza-chair.html〕 He is the Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He is also a founding patron of the small liberal arts college Ralston College. His corpus includes five volumes of collected works, seven books, and more than 200 articles. Putnam's renewed interest in Judaism has inspired him to publish several recent books and essays on the topic. With his wife, he has co-authored several books and essays on the late-19th-century American pragmatist movement.〔 Putnam began a blog in May 2014: http://putnamphil.blogspot.com. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hilary Putnam」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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