Hilary Putnam has been convinced for some time that the present
situation in philosophy calls for revitalization and renewal; in
this latest book he shows us what shape he would like that renewal
to take. "Words and Life" offers a sweeping account of the sources
of several of the central problems of philosophy, past and present,
and of why some of those problems are not going to go away As the
first four part tides in the volume-"The Return of Aristotle," "The
Legacy of Logical Positivism," "The Inheritance of Pragmatism," and
"Essays after Wittgenstein"-suggest, many of the essays are
concerned with tracing the recent, and the not so recent, history
of these problems.
The goal is to bring out what is coercive and arbitrary about
some of our present ways of posing the problems and what is of
continuing interest in certain past approaches to them. Various
supposedly timeless philosophical problems appear, on closer
inspection, to change with altered historical circumstances, while
there turns out to be much of permanent value in Aristotle's,
Peirce's, Dewey's, and Reichenbach's work on some of the problems
that continue to exercise us.
A unifying theme of the volume as a whole is that reductionism,
scientism, and old-style disenchanted naturalism tend to be
obstacles to philosophical progress. The titles of the final three
parts of the volume-Truth and Reference," "Mind and Language," and
"The Diversity of the Sciences-indicate that the sweep of the
problems considered here comprehends all the fundamental areas of
contemporary analytic philosophy Rich in detail, the book is also
grand in scope, allowing us to trace the ongoing intellectual
evolution of one of the mostsignificant philosophers of the
century.
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