First published in 1990, this is a reissue of Professor Hilary Putnam 's dissertation thesis, written in 1951, which concerns itself with The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences and the problems of the deductive justification for induction. Written under the direction of Putnam 's mentor, Hans Reichenbach, the book considers Reichenbach 's idealization of very long finite sequences as infinite sequences and the bearing this has upon Reichenbach 's pragmatic vindication of induction.

This book brings together key players in the current debate on positive and normative science and philosophy and value judgements in economics. Both editors have engaged in these debates throughout their careers from its early foundations; Putnam as a doctorial student of Hans Reichenbach at UCLA and Walsh a junior member of Lord Robbins's department at the London School of Economics, both in the early 1950s. This book collects recent contributions from Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen and Partha Dasgupta, as well as a new chapter from the editors.

First published in 1978, this reissue presents a seminal philosophical work by professor Putnam, in which he puts forward a conception of knowledge which makes ethics, practical knowledge and non-mathematic parts of the social sciences just as much parts of 'knowledge' as the sciences themselves. He also rejects the idea that knowledge can be demarcated from non-knowledge by the fact that the former alone adheres to 'the scientific method'.

The first part of the book consists of Professor Putnam's John Locke lectures, delivered at the University of Oxford in 1976, offering a detailed examination of a 'physicalist' theory of reference against a background of the works of Tarski, Carnap, Popper, Hempel and Kant. The analysis then extends to notions of truth, the character of linguistic enquiry and social scientific enquiry in general, interconnecting with the great metaphysical problem of realism, the nature of language and reference, and the character of ourselves.

A collection of Hilary Putnam's stimulating, incisive responses to such varied and eminent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky, Martha Nussbaum, W. V. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and Cornel West. Hilary Putnam (1926-2016) was renowned-some would say infamous-for changing his philosophical positions over the course of his long and much-admired career. This collection of essays, the first of its kind, showcases how his ideas evolved as he wrestled with the work of his contemporaries. Divided into five thematic sections, Philosophy as Dialogue begins with questions of language and formal logic, tracing Putnam's reactions to the arguments of Wilfrid Sellars, Noam Chomsky, Charles Travis, and Tyler Burge. Next, it brings together Putnam's responses to realists and antirealists, philosophers of science and of perception, followed by forays into pragmatism and skepticism. While Putnam devoted most of his efforts to logic, mathematics, and the philosophy of mind, he also took up issues in moral philosophy, politics, and religion. Here we read him in conversation with giants of these fields, including Martha Nussbaum, Jurgen Habermas, Elizabeth Anscombe, Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty, and Franz Rosenzweig. Finally, Philosophy as Dialogue presents Putnam's deeply personal and largely unknown writing on philosophical method that reveals the influence of W. V. Quine, Michael Dummett, and Stanley Cavell on his work. Once more, Mario De Caro and David Macarthur have presented and introduced a choice selection of Hilary Putnam's writings that will change the way he is understood. Most of all, these thirty-six replies and responses to his contemporaries showcase the extraordinary-perhaps even unparalleled-breadth of his work, and his capacity to engage deeply with seemingly every mode of philosophy.

This volume brings together leading scholars to examine Darwinian perspectives on morality from widely ranging disciplines: evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology. They bring not only varied expertise, but also contrasting judgments about which, and to what extent, differing evolutionary accounts explain morality. They also consider the implications of these explanations for a range of religious and non-religious moral traditions. The book first surveys scientific understandings of morality. Chapters by Joan Silk and Christopher Boehm ask what primatology and anthropology tell us about moral origins. Daniel Batson and Stephen Pinker provide contrasting accounts of how evolution shapes moral psychology, and Jeffrey Schloss assesses a range of biological proposals for morality and altruism. Turning to philosophical issues, Martha Nussbaum argues that recognizing our animal nature does not threaten morality. Stephen Pope and Timothy Jackson explore how Darwinian accounts of moral goodness both enrich and require understandings outside the sciences. Hilary Putnam and Susan Neiman ask whether Darwin is truly useful for helping us to understand what morality actually is and how it functions. The book is a balanced effort to assess the scientific merits and philosophical significance of emerging Darwinian perspectives on morality.

First published in 1971, Professor Putnam's essay concerns itself with the ontological problem in the philosophy of logic and mathematics - that is, the issue of whether the abstract entities spoken of in logic and mathematics really exist. He also deals with the question of whether or not reference to these abstract entities is really indispensible in logic and whether it is necessary in physical science in general.

This volume brings together leading scholars to examine Darwinian perspectives on morality from widely ranging disciplines: evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology. They bring not only varied expertise, but also contrasting judgments about which, and to what extent, differing evolutionary accounts explain morality. They also consider the implications of these explanations for a range of religious and non-religious moral traditions.

The book first surveys scientific understandings of morality. Chapters by Joan Silk and Christopher Boehm ask what primatology and anthropology tell us about moral origins. Daniel Batson and Stephen Pinker provide contrasting accounts of how evolution shapes moral psychology, and Jeffrey Schloss assesses a range of biological proposals for morality and altruism. Turning to philosophical issues, Martha Nussbaum argues that recognizing our animal nature does not threaten morality. Stephen Pope and Timothy Jackson explore how Darwinian accounts of moral goodness both enrich and require understandings outside the sciences. Hilary Putnam and Susan Neiman ask whether Darwin is truly useful for helping us to understand what morality actually is and how it functions.

The book is a balanced effort to assess the scientific merits and philosophical significance of emerging Darwinian perspectives on morality.

This book brings together key players in the current debate on positive and normative science and philosophy and value judgements in economics. Both editors have engaged in these debates throughout their careers from its early foundations; Putnam as a doctorial student of Hans Reichenbach at UCLA and Walsh a junior member of Lord Robbins's department at the London School of Economics, both in the early 1950s. This book collects recent contributions from Martha Nussbaum and Harvey Gram, as well as a new chapter from the editors.

First published in 1990, this is a reissue of Professor Hilary Putnam's dissertation thesis, written in 1951, which concerns itself with The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences and the problems of the deductive justification for induction. Written under the direction of Putnam's mentor, Hans Reichenbach, the book considers Reichenbach's idealization of very long finite sequences as infinite sequences and the bearing this has upon Reichenbach's pragmatic vindication of induction.

Professor Hilary Putnam has been one of the most influential and sharply original of recent American philosophers in a whole range of fields. His most important published work is collected here, together with several new and substantial studies, in two volumes. The first deals with the philosophy of mathematics and of science and the nature of philosophical and scientific enquiry; the second deals with the philosophy of language and mind. Volume one is now issued in a new edition, including an essay on the philosophy of logic first published in 1971.

Concerned with some of the most fundamental problems in philosophy, the nature of truth, knowledge, and rationality, Putnam's aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought that have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

This is the third volume of Hilary Putnam’s philosophical papers, published in paperback for the first time. The volume contains his major essays from 1975 to 1982, which reveal a large shift in emphasis in the ‘realist’ position developed in his earlier work. While not renouncing those views, Professor Putnam has continued to explore their epistemological consequences and conceptual history. He now, crucially, sees theories of truth and of meaning that derive from a firm notion of reference as inadequate.

First published in 1971, Professor Putnam's essay concerns itself with the ontological problem in the philosophy of logic and mathematics - that is, the issue of whether the abstract entities spoken of in logic and mathematics really exist. He also deals with the question of whether or not reference to these abstract entities is really indispensible in logic and whether it is necessary in physical science in general.

First published in 1978, this reissue presents a seminal philosophical work by professor Putnam, in which he puts forward a conception of knowledge which makes ethics, practical knowledge and non-mathematic parts of the social sciences just as much parts of 'knowledge' as the sciences themselves. He also rejects the idea that knowledge can be demarcated from non-knowledge by the fact that the former alone adheres to 'the scientific method'. The first part of the book consists of Professor Putnam's John Locke lectures, delivered at the University of Oxford in 1976, offering a detailed examination of a 'physicalist' theory of reference against a background of the works of Tarski, Carnap, Popper, Hempel and Kant. The analysis then extends to notions of truth, the character of linguistic enquiry and social scientific enquiry in general, interconnecting with the great metaphysical problem of realism, the nature of language and reference, and the character of ourselves.

The volumes in this series bring together the papers of one of America's most distinguished philosophers. The first two volumes, which appeared in 1975, marked his highly significant and original contribution in a number of related fields and were praised for their "technical sophistication, clear-sightedness, depth, and power." The third volume contains the major essays written since then and reveals modifications of and amplifications on some of Professor Putnam's beliefs.

Hilary Putnam's unceasing self-criticism has led to the frequent changes of mind he is famous for, but his thinking is also marked by considerable continuity. A simultaneous interest in science and ethics-unusual in the current climate of contention-has long characterized his thought. In Philosophy in an Age of Science, Putnam collects his papers for publication-his first volume in almost two decades. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur's introduction identifies central themes to help the reader negotiate between Putnam past and Putnam present: his critique of logical positivism; his enduring aspiration to be realist about rational normativity; his anti-essentialism about a range of central philosophical notions; his reconciliation of the scientific worldview and the humanistic tradition; and his movement from reductive scientific naturalism to liberal naturalism. Putnam returns here to some of his first enthusiasms in philosophy, such as logic, mathematics, and quantum mechanics. The reader is given a glimpse, too, of ideas currently in development on the subject of perception. Putnam's work, contributing to a broad range of philosophical inquiry, has been said to represent a "history of recent philosophy in outline." Here it also delineates a possible future.

Includes several classic essays from the first edition, a representative selection of the most influential work of the past twenty years, a substantial introduction, and an extended bibliography. Originally published by Prentice-Hall in 1964.

Throughout his diverse and highly influential career, Hilary Putnam was famous for changing his mind. As a pragmatist he treated philosophical "positions" as experiments in deliberate living. His aim was not to fix on one position but to attempt to do justice to the depth and complexity of reality. In this new collection, he and Ruth Anna Putnam argue that key elements of the classical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey provide a framework for the most progressive and forward-looking forms of philosophy in contemporary thought. The Putnams present a compelling defense of the radical originality of the philosophical ideas of James and Dewey and their usefulness in confronting the urgent social, political, and moral problems of the twenty-first century. Pragmatism as a Way of Life brings together almost all of the Putnams' pragmatist writings-essays they wrote as individuals and as coauthors. The pragmatism they endorse, though respectful of the sciences, is an open experience-based philosophy of our everyday lives that trenchantly criticizes the fact/value dualism running through contemporary culture. Hilary Putnam argues that all facts are dependent on cognitive values, while Ruth Anna Putnam turns the problem around, illuminating the factual basis of moral principles. Together, they offer a shared vision which, in Hilary's words, "could serve as a manifesto for what the two of us would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-first century and beyond."

Hilary Putnam's ever-evolving philosophical oeuvre has been called "the history of recent philosophy in outline"-an intellectual achievement, nearly seventy years in the making, that has shaped disciplinary fields from epistemology to ethics, metaphysics to the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of mathematics to the philosophy of mind. Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity offers new avenues into the thought of one of the most influential minds in contemporary analytic philosophy. The essays collected here cover a range of interconnected topics including naturalism, commonsense and scientific realism, ethics, perception, language and linguistics, and skepticism. Aptly illustrating Putnam's willingness to revisit and revise past arguments, they contain important new insights and freshly illuminate formulations that will be familiar to students of his work: his rejection of the idea that an absolute conception of the world is obtainable; his criticism of a nihilistic view of ethics that claims to be scientifically based; his pathbreaking distinction between sensations and apperceptions; and his use of externalist semantics to invalidate certain forms of skepticism. Above all, Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity reflects Putnam's thinking on how to articulate a theory of naturalism which acknowledges that normative phenomena form an ineluctable part of human experience, thereby reconciling scientific and humanistic views of the world that have long appeared incompatible.

Here, in a new edition, is Nelson Goodman's provocative philosophical classic--a book that, according to "Science," "raised a storm of controversy" when it was first published in 1954, and one that remains on the front lines of philosophical debate.

How is it that we feel confident in generalizing from experience in some ways but not in others? How are generalizations that are warranted to be distinguished from those that are not? Goodman shows that these questions resist formal solution and his demonstration has been taken by nativists like Chomsky and Fodor as proof that neither scientific induction nor ordinary learning can proceed without an "a priori," or innate, ordering of hypotheses.

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims. The controversy surrounding these unsolved problems is as relevant to the psychology of cognitive development as it is to the philosophy of science. No serious student of either discipline can afford to misunderstand Goodman's classic argument.

What is the relationship between our perceptions and reality? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? These are questions with which philosophers have grappled for centuries, and they are topics of considerable contemporary debate as well. Hilary Putnam has approached the divisions between perception and reality and between mind and body with great creativity throughout his career. Now, in "The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World, " he expounds upon these issues, elucidating both the strengths and weaknesses of current schools of thought. With his characteristic wit and acuity, Putnam offers refreshing solutions to some of philosophy's most vexing problems.

Putnam first examines the problem of realism: is objective truth possible? He acknowledges the deep impasse between empirical and idealist approaches to this question, critiquing them both, however, by highlighting the false assumption they share, that we cannot perceive the world directly. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin and William James, Putnam develops a subtle and creative alternative, which he calls "natural realism."

The second part of the book explores the mind-body question: is the mind independent of our interactions with the physical world? Again, Putnam critically assesses two sharply antithetical contemporary approaches and finds them both lacking. "The Threefold Cord" shows the entire mind-body debate to be miscast and draws on the later work of Wittgenstein, once more advancing original views on perception and thought and their relationship with both the body and the external world. Finally, Putnam takes up two related problems -- the role of causality in human behavior and whether or not thoughts and sensations have an "existence" all their own.

With Putnam's lucid prose and insightful examples, "The Threefold Cord" loosens the Gordian knots into which philosophy has bound itself over the issue of epistemology.

"The first two lectures place the alternative I defend -- a kind of pragmatic realism -- in a historical and metaphysical context. Part of that context is provided by Husserl's remark that the history of modern philosophy begins with Galileo -- that is, modern philosophy has been hypnotized by the idea that scientific facts are all the facts there are. Another part is provided by the analysis of a very simple example of what I call 'contextual relativity'. The position I defend holds that truth depends on conceptual scheme and it is nonetheless 'real truth'.

"In my third lecture I turn to the Kantian antecedents of this view, explaining what I think should be retained of the Kantian idea of autonomy as the central theme of morality, and extracting from Kant's work a 'moral image of the world' that connects the ideals of equality and intellectual liberty. In this lecture I defend the idea that moral images are an indispensible part of our moral and cultural heritage.

"In the final lecture I defend the idea of moral objectivity. I compare our epistemological positions in ethics, history, analysis of human character, and science, and I argue that in no area can we hope for a 'foundation' which is more ultimate than the beliefs that actually, at a given time, function as foundational in the area, the beliefs concerning which one has to say 'this is where my spade is turned'. In ethics such beliefs are represented in moral images of the world".