The time has come to reform philosophy, says Hilary Putnam, one of
America's great philosophers. He calls upon philosophers to attend
to the gap between the present condition of their subject and the
human aspirations that philosophy should and once did claim to
represent. Putnam's goal is to embed philosophy in social life.
The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical
questions. Putnam rejects the contemporary metaphysics that insists
on describing both the mind and the world from a God's-eye view. In
its place he argues for pluralism, for a philosophy that is not a
closed systematic method but a human practice connected to real
life. Philosophy has a task, to be sure, but it is not to provide
an inventory of the basic furniture of the universe or to separate
reality in itself from our own projections. Putnam makes it clear
that science is not in the business of describing a ready-made
world, and philosophy should not be in that business either.
The author moves on to show that the larger human context in
which science matters is a world of values animated by ethics and
aesthetic judgments. No adequate philosophy should try to explain
away ethical facts. The dimension of history is added in the third
part of the book. Here Putnam takes up a set of American
philosophers, some firmly within and others outside the canon of
analytic philosophy, such as William James and C. S. Peirce, and he
explores the pragmatist contribution to philosophy from James to
Quine and Goodman.
This book connects issues in metaphysics with cultural and
literary issues and argues that the collapse of philosophical
realism does not entail a fall into the abyss of relativism
andpostmodern skepticism. It is aimed primarily at philosophers but
should appeal to a wide range of humanists and social
scientists.
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