Hilary Putnam

A collection of Hilary Putnam's stimulating, incisive responses to such varied and eminent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky, Martha Nussbaum, W. V. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and Cornel West. Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) was renowned—sometimes even infamous—for changing his philosophical positions over the course of his long and much-admired career. This collection of essays, the first of...

Hilary Putnam has been at the centre of contemporary debates about the nature of the mind and its access to the world, about language and its relation to reality, and many other metaphysical and epistemological issues. In this book, he turns to pragmatism and confronts the teachings of James, Peirce, Dewey, and Wittgenstein—not solely out of an interest in theoretical...