Hilary Putnam Cogan University Professor Emeritus, Harvard University To appear in the "American Philosophers" edition of Literary Biography, ed. Bruccoli, Layman and Clarke By Lance P. Hickey. Assistant Professor of Philosophy. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Terre Haute, IN 47807 telephone: (812) 872-6227 email: lance.hickey@rose-hulman.edu

Hilary Putnam, one of the most important American philosophers of the Post-World War II generation, has also been one of the most prolific. His corpus includes five volumes of collected works, seven books, and over 200 articles, on an astonishing variety of topics ranging over philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic and mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. In many of these areas, he has proved to be not only an active participant, but a foundational thinker. His original contributions include one of the first attempts to model the mind on that of a computer, the development of a "quantum logic," a comprehensive theory of meaning for natural languages, arguments for and against various kinds of realism, and (more recently) a thoroughgoing critique of the materialistic outlook characteristic of most American philosophy during the latter half of the 20th Century. Richard Rorty, another influential philosopher of the same generation, has aptly compared him to Bertrand Russell, "not just in intellectual curiosity and willingness to change his mind, but in the breadth of his interests and in the extent of his social and moral concerns."

Like Russell, Putnam began his career as the consummate analytic philosopher, skilled in the business of refuting arguments and texts. But again like the Cambridge don, his interests soon led him to other issues, both within the mainstream of the philosophical community and without. In American Philosophers, dialogues with leading contemporary philosophers published in 1994, we find Putnam talking about his recent encounters with Continental thought and the work of Jurgen Habermas, the relation between philosophy and one's religious outlook, and the importance of recovering the philosophical and moral insights of American Pragmatists such as John Dewey and William James. Like those who equated Russell with a particularly "English" style of philosophy, Putnam has established himself as a kind of "elder statesman" of American philosophy. His meetings with Habermas in Frankfort in 1995 were heralded by many as a kind of "marriage" between Analytic and Continental philosophy, two schools of thought that have become increasingly alienated from one another since the turn of the 20th Century.

John Passmore, a historian of philosophy, has remarked that trying to catch Putnam's philosophy is like trying to "capture the wind with a fishing net." This is true to some extent, not only because of the range of his writings, but because he has shifted his position several times on some key philosophical issues. Yet throughout his career, Putnam has been consistent in his injunctions against all kinds of philosophical imperialism, those views that try to insist on "one and only one" way to describe the world or approach a philosophical problem. Hence we find Putnam battling various "isms" that have sought dogmatic control over the minds of philosophers and laymen alike. Positivism, reductionism, conventionalism, behaviorism, materialism, scientism, and metaphysical realism: these are but a few of the views that have suffered serious setbacks as a result of his labors. It may be that there is no "essence" to Putnam's philosophy; and yet if we focus on Putnam's philosophical liberality, his open-ended inquiry into ideas, we might find some common element in his writings after all. Following loose threads where they will, utilizing the latest discoveries in the various sciences without becoming blinded by them, even taking cues now and then from the literary genre of science fiction, Putnam has constantly taken the experimental route, always in the hope that progess can be made in philosophy.

Putnam was born in Chicago in 1926, and got his PhD at UCLA in 1951 with a thesis entitled "The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences." His teachers, Rudolph Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, commanded respect as the undisputed leaders of "Logical Positivism," a school of thought that became the dominant force in American philosophy for most of the middle Century. Under their tutelage, he was steeped in the philosophy of mathematics, logic, and the philosophy of science. After brief teaching stints at Northwestern and MIT, Putnam moved to Harvard University in 1965 with his wife, Ruth Anna, who herself took a teaching position in philosophy at MIT. At Harvard, Putnam quickly became one of the most popular teachers on the campus, as well as one of the most politically active. In 1976 he was elected President of the American Philosophical Association, which occasion he took to deliver one of the most memorable presidential addresses in the history of the APA. This was soon followed by selection as Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Mathematical Logic, in recognition of Putnam's outstanding contributions to the philosophy of logic and mathematics. Recently, Putnam has been honored by two full-length anthologies devoted to his career work: "The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam," published in the Spring 1994 edition of Philosophical Topics, and Reading Putnam, edited by Peter Clarke and Bob Hale. These books give some indication of the incredible range of issues that Putnam deals with, as well as the depth of his contributions.

As a point of entry into his work, there is no better place to begin with than his early struggles to come to terms with Logical Positivism. Even while Putnam became one of the most trenchant critics of Positivism, he ineluctably inherited some of its most outstanding characteristics: the idea that philosophy should be modeled on the methods of the natural sciences, the use of linguistic and logical analysis to solve philosophical puzzles, and the rejection of the a priori and other discredited elements of past "metaphysical" ways of thinking. Nevertheless, as a result of his merciless probings of his teachers Carnap and Reichenbach, and under the influence of W. V. Quine, he soon became disillusioned with Positivism and initiated a wholesale attack against some of its most important theses, particularly its verifiability theory of meaning, the rigid distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, and the bifurcation between mathematics and empirical science. Putnam's early articles in the late 50s and early 60s

(collected in the first two volumes of his Philosophical Papers) are generally considered feats of analytic genius and originality, and did much to free Anglo-American philosophy of the shadow that Positivism had cast over the entire generation.

At the same time, Putnam's philosophical style has always been to steer between extreme positions and to strike a responsible balance, and this is certainly true of his encounters with Positivism. A good example of Putnam's consistent attempt to not "throw the baby out with the bathwater" concerns his adjudication of the debate between Quine and the Positivists concerning the concept of analyticity. The Positivists were renowned for holding a semantic view according to which every meaningful sentence is either a "rule of language" which is analytic (or, to use Wittgenstein's phrase, a "mere tautology"), or a "matter of fact," known by experience. Quine challenged this view

(in his famous "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," published in 1951) by arguing, first, that the Positivists could not give a non-circular account of analyticity, and second, that because individual sentences cannot be verified in isolation from a whole body of theory, the idea that we could test the meaning of a sentence one-to-one against experience is part of a naive "museum myth" of meaning. Quine's conclusion was unabashedly pessimistic: he enjoined philosophers to give up on the concept of analyticity, and indeed on the concept of "meaning" itself, for no further progress could be made in those areas.

In 1957, while visiting the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, Putnam wrote "The Analytic and the Synthetic" as a response to Quine's views. He basically agreed with Quine that the Positivist distinction is untenable: there are many statements that are neither purely analytic nor synthetic, but rather stand on a continuum between the two poles, shifting back and forth as new knowledge gathers. But Quine was wrong to insist that there are no sentences which are analytic. "All bachelors are unmarried males" and "oculists are eye-doctors" are two examples of sentence-types that are indeed analytic, for we cannot revise these kinds of statements without changing the meanings of the terms. Putnam calls terms such as "bachelor" one-criterion terms, and contrasts them with scientific terms like "energy," or mathematical terms like "straight line." In the past, statements like "e=1/2mv2" or "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" may have been considered analytically true, relative to the theories they were couched in, but they are now shown to be false. The lesson to be learned from this history is to be suspicious of claims that statements of a certain class are "immune to revision." There may be a few such statements, but these are trivial; the "weighty" definitions and laws of mathematics, logic, and science are, as Putnam writes in the article "statements with respect to which it is not happy to ask the question "analytic or synthetic?"(p. 39)

Putnam's critique of Positivism included an in-depth analysis of mathematical truth and the alleged rigid distinction between the statements of mathematics and those of empirical science. The choice the Positivists presented us with: either the principles of mathematics are merely conventions that say nothing, or about Platonic objects of which we can have a priori knowledge, is a false dichotomy, according to Putnam. Rather, what we consider to be "a priori" is itself theory-relative, such that even if the principles of mathematics are "more a priori" than those of physics, they do not reflect a realm of eternal truths, but are revisable just like any other kind of statement. Indeed, it is not even true to say that basic logical laws like the law of non-contradiction are a priori true, for we can envision cases where the law breaks down, as in quantum physics, where we find an electron in a "superposition," that is, in two places at the same time. If the world is as bizarre as this, we may need to modify our logic to account for it. In short, there are no priveledged sets of truths: there may be a difference in how well-entrenched a given statement is from another, but the difference is one of degree and not one of kind.

Along with this "liberal" attitude with respect to the epistemology of mathematics came a new flexibility with regard to its ontology. Putnam proposed, again in contrast to the Positivists, that there is nothing wrong in countenancing the existence of so-called "abstract" entities such as numbers (deemed too "metaphysical" by the Positivists), so long as numbers are indispensable in the formulation of physical theories. This argument- now called the Quine-Putnam "indispensability" argument- is still a topic of much debate, particularly amongst naturalist-minded philosophers who have to account for the role mathematics and logic play in the hard sciences. In his later work, Putnam would go even further, holding that numbers, moral values, ice cubes and baseball games are all on ontological par with entities such as electrons or the flowers that we plant in our gardens. Furthermore, the question "how many objects are there?" when pointing at three baseballs can vary, depending on the background "theory" that we have about what it means to be an object. To the Polish logician, there may be nine objects, since an object can be defined as any mereological sum of two or more individuals. In short, although there are many wrong answers one can give to such questions
(Putnam is not saying that it is "all relative" or a matter of "arbitrary" convention), there doesn't necessarily have to be one right answer.

Putnam's work in the philosophy of mathematics and logic earned him the Beverly Pearson Chair in Mathematical Logic at Harvard, but he could have been easily awarded a Chair for his pioneering work in what would later be called "artificial intelligence." In the late 50s, there were basically only three positions available to the philosopher who sought to understand the nature of the mind: a Cartesian dualism, according to which the mind and the body represent two ontologically distinct kinds of entity; logical behaviorism, which reduced all talk about the mind to statements about the organism's behavior and patterns of stimulus and response; and type-identity theory, which simply identified a given type of mental-state with a given type of brain-state. Putnam rejected all three of these positions and developed his own theory of the mind, which has since come to be known as "functionalism." He didn't spend much time arguing against dualism, since that theory was considered outside the scope of a respectable scientific view. However, he detailed attacks against type-identity theory and behaviorism in articles that were to be anthologized again and again as "classics" in the literature.

In "Brains and Behavior" (1963), he argued that behaviorism is based on a faulty theory of meaning, according to which being in a certain mental state, such as pain, simply means that one is in a certain sort of behavior-state. This ignores the fact that "pain" is used often as a name for a sensation that is private to the individual. In the even more widely-cited "The Nature of Mental States" (1967), Putnam presented a devastating objection to type-identity theory. According to that theory, all organisms that are in the same state of being in pain must be in the exact same physical brain-state. But surely a mammal and an octopus can be in the same state of "being hungry," and since their brain-structures are dissimilar, they cannot be in the same physical state. The problem is one of "multiple realizability:" the same mental state-type can be realized in a variety of hardwares.

Putnam proposed that mental states be described, not as behavioral dispositions or physical-chemical states, but rather as those states that are causally responsible for the production of behavior in a computationally defined system of inputs and outputs. Just as a computer program can be realized in a variety of different hardware, so a shared mental state-type or belief can be registered in a variety of different organisms or functional systems (including silicon-based Martians or robots). In this way, Putnam's functionalism overcame the problem of type-identity theory, which demanded too strict a connection between mental and physical states. But the theory was also an improvement over behaviorism, since it defined mental states in terms of intrinsic properties rather than overt behavior. And indeed, for a long time, functionalism seemed to carry the day: it appeared to many philosophers to effectively account for the deficiencies of both behaviorism and type-identity-theory, allow for talk of intrinsic properties while preserving the important connections to behavior, and fall in line with most of our commonsense beliefs about the nature of mental activity. Recently, however, functionalism has been under attack from many quarters, even from Putnam himself who in his book Representation and Reality (1988) launches a battery of arguments against his original theory. Even so, it is safe to say that functionalism is still the most respected theory of the mind currently available.

In the midst of this prodigious output of philosophical activity, Putnam was thrown into the controversy surrounding the Vietnam War. In 1963, while he was teaching at MIT, he organized one of the first faculty and student committees against the war. He was particularly outraged by David Halberstam's reporting, especially the claim that the U. S. was "defending" the peasants of South Vietnam from the Viet Cong by poisoning their rice crop. As the war continued, Putnam's outrage intensified, and after moving to Harvard in 1965, he organized various campus protests, in conjunction with teaching courses on Marxism. He was the official faculty advisor to the Students for a Democratic Society, which was at that time the main anti-Vietnam War organization on campus, and eventually he became a member of the "Progressive Labor" faction, which espoused (in Putnam's words), an "idiosyncratic version of Marxism-Leninism." In time he became disillusioned with the group for what he perceived as the very same manipulative and exploitative measures that they were criticizing the U. S. for. While he broke with that line of thinking, he never abandoned the idea that philosophers have a social and political responsibility as well as an academic one. He has been outspoken on moral and political issues ever since, as some of his eloquent articles "How Not to Solve Ethical Questions" (1983) and "Education for Democracy" (1993) testify to.

Fittingly, Putnam was one of the first philosophers to critically examine the work of that other outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, Noam Chomsky. While not taking anything away from Chomsky's revolutionary work in linguistics, Putnam was critical of the attempt by some of Chomsky's more zealous followers to employ purely linguistic methods in answering questions of meaning. This approach ignores the way the world itself contributes in determining the meanings of our terms. Putnam developed this idea into a comprehensive theory of meaning, most eloquently articulated in the article "The Meaning of Meaning" (1975), which many take to be his most influential philosophical work. Putnam's semantics takes off from an attempt to solve the problem of natural-kind terms, which were largely ignored before he drew attention to them. The question is how we are to account for the meaning of mass terms like "water" and "gold" or sortals like "lemon" and "cat." On the "traditional" conception of meaning circa 1960, the answer would be that the meanings of such terms can be captured by analytic definitions, of the kind "cat" means "feline animal," or "lemon" means "yellow, tart-tasting, thick-peeled fruit." The natural-kind term is synonymous with the description, and any speaker of the language, in order to use the term competently, must "grasp" the linguistic information associated with the term. Although this view of meaning was called into question by Ludwig Wittgenstein and especially by Quine in his attack on the sharp distinction between questions of meaning and questions of fact, it was not until Putnam's work that a clear alternative emerged.

Putnam pointed out that a typical speaker need not have a grasp of any specific linguistic or conceptual information in order to use a term. This ignores the fact that a term is not synonymous with any description or cluster of descriptions. Language is more flexible than that: terms can continue to have the same meaning, even through theory change, and this is because the meaning of a term is anchored more tightly in the referential usage of the term. Eventually this kind of reasoning led Putnam to his thesis of semantic externalism: the meanings of certain terms (paradigmatically proper names, natural-kind terms, and indexicals) could not be determined merely by an examination of what is in the mind of a speaker using the term. We have to look at the causal relations between these terms and objects in the world, in order to know what the speaker means. As a dramatic illustration of this point, Putnam takes a page out of science fiction, and asks us to imagine a planet somewhere in the universe that is molecule-for-molecule identical with ours, except for one difference: on that planet, what we call "water" is made of the chemical compound XYZ, not H2O. When Oscar on Earth and Twin-Oscar on Twin-earth utter "water is wet," they might be in the same psychological state (since they are molecule-for-molecule identical), but they mean different things by their utterances. Oscar means that water is wet, whereas Twin-Oscar means that twin-water is wet. The meanings of our terms change with differences in the environment. Putnam concludes his discussion with characteristic straight talk: "Cut the pie any way you like it, meanings just ain't in the head!"

Putnam's externalism, conjoined with some of Saul Kripke's arguments in Naming and Necessity (presented as a series of lectures at Princeton in 1971) helped to inaugurate a revolution in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Many philosophers believe that Putnam and Kripke radically subverted what might be called the "Cartesian" or "internalist" view held by nearly every philosopher since Plato and his search for proper definitions. On the internalist conception of meaning, knowing what a word means is a matter of associating it with the right conceptual information, and this can be done independently of knowing whether this conceptual information is true of anything in the world. It follows that one can understand what a word means, and therefore possess one's concepts, regardless of the way the world is, indeed regardless of whether there is an independent world at all. This conception of meaning in the philosophy of language leads to a parallel thesis in the philosophy of mind. If one's concepts can be known independently of the world, then one's thoughts and beliefs can be known independently of the world. Cartesian views had it that our thoughts and beliefs are like mental objects that our mind can have immediate, non-inferential perception of. Modern views drop the mental imagery but keep the immediate, direct, and non-inferential part. In any case, the crucial Cartesian claim is left intact: there is a fundamental asymmetry between our knowledge of our minds and our knowledge of the world. In addition to this epistemological thesis there is a metaphysical one: the mind and the world form two ontologically distinct domains. This is brought out by the disturbing fact that the identity-conditions for the one in no way depend on the identity-conditions for the other.

Putnam and Kripke upset this view in their holding that we often have to look outside the speaker's head, to what items in the environment the speaker's words are causally related to, in order to know what the speaker means. For this thesis about the meanings of terms leads to an equivalent thesis about concepts: concept-possession is not a matter of introspection, but a matter of word-world connections. And if beliefs are composed of concepts, then it follows that knowing what beliefs we have is not internal either: in order to know what our thoughts and beliefs are in the cases under investigation, we have to know what objects and properties there are that these thoughts and beliefs are about. The result is an inversion of the Cartesian view of the mind: if there is a fundamental assymetry between knowledge of the mind and knowledge of the world, it works the other way around. Knowledge of our thoughts and beliefs depends on the world, and not vice versa. This view, now known as psychological externalism, is at the center of contemporary discussion in the philosophy of mind. It presents in particular a challenge to materialistic conceptions of the mind, which hold that thoughts and beliefs are dependent on internal states of an organism, such as neurophysiological patternings. And in part, it is this consequence of his own semantic views that led Putnam to question his earlier views in the philosophy of mind.

Putnam's most serious change of mind, and the one which earned him the epithet "renegade Putnam," was dropped like a bomb on the philosophical community in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in 1976. Up to that time, Putnam had been pushing a strong "realist" line with respect to the mind-independence of theoretical entities such as electrons. In fact, he was the leading spokesperson for "scientific realism," the view that theoretical entities exist outside their being proved within any particular theory. But in his presidential address, Putnam explicitly gave up the metaphysical claims associated with scientific realism, in particular the idea that scientific truth consists in some kind of correspondence between terms and mind-independent entities. Putnam distinguished between two positions: a "metaphysical realism" which holds onto the "radically non-epistemic" nature of truth, and his own modified version of scientific realism, called "internal realism," which takes science at face value and holds that there is nothing more to truth than what would be rationally accepted at the end of scientific inquiry. For the next ten years, Putnam would devote himself to an all-out attack on metaphysical realism and to the development of his own positive views on the concepts of truth and rationality. While Putnam's "break" with his past was not as dramatic as many have supposed (it was more a shift in emphasis), it does mark the beginning of a new perspective for Putnam on the role of philosophy in general. Putnam began to see philosophy more and more as a total view of the human condition, rather than as a series of piecemeal arguments and refutations of authors and texts. The titles of Putnam's ensuing books, The Many Faces of Realism (1986) and Realism with a Human Face (1987) give some idea of his attempt to point to the human context within which all philosophical discussion takes place, and indicates an open-minded tolerance for various kinds of norm-governed discourse not susceptible to materialistic or "scientistic" reductions.

Putnam's most famous challenge to the metaphysical realist outlook is his ingenius "Brains in a Vat" argument, which is included in his 1982 work Reason, Truth and History. The metaphysical realist who is committed to the thesis that there are no epistemic constraints on our concepts of reality or truth must also be committed to the possibility that there is a gap between what reality is and what we take it to be. This skeptical possibility is dramatized by various thought-experiments, such as our being deceived by an evil demon (Descartes), or the modern scenario in which we are all brains in a vat hooked up to a sophisticated computer that simulates our experience of the world. Putnam takes an indirect route against metaphysical realism by advancing the extraordinary claim that it is impossible for us to be brains in a vat. Why not? Well, on the hypothesis that we are brains in a vat, we cannot really refer to external objects, for we are not causally connected to real trees or stones; at best we are causally connected to the electonic programming of the computer. It follows that when a brain in a vat says "there is an apple," she is saying something false, insofar as she intends to refer to real apples that she is causally related to. The same goes for all her referential statements. But now consider the statement "I am a brain in a vat," as uttered by a brain in a vat. This purports to be a referential statement, referring to real brains and real vats. But on the premise that such referential statements are false, it follows that "I am a brain in a vat" is itself false. Putnam calls such an argument a "transcendental" one in the Kantian sense, for once we see what the conditions on reference are, it will follow a priori that we cannot be brains in a vat. And this is enough to confute the metaphysical realist assertion that there can be no a priori proof against the skeptic.

Most philosophers don't quite buy the argument, for there is an unmistakable feeling that some sleight of hand is going on, some semantic trick that, when exposed, will send the argument up in smoke. But while there has been a lot of hot air sent up in fierce debate regarding Putnam's argument, there is still no consensus as to what he has proved or the significance of the proof even if correct. In a recent discussion regarding this debate, Putnam has remarked that the real point of the argument is to illustrate the "alienated" nature of metaphysical realist ways of looking at the world. Such global possibilities as being brains in a vat or being deceived by an evil demon have been traditionally construed as posing deep epistemological or metaphysical problems for philosophers. But these "possibilities" rest on the idea that we can "step outside of our skins," that is, see ourselves and our condition from some objective "God's Eye point of view," or (for those secularly-minded) from a "view from nowhere," to use Thomas Nagel's phrase. But we are certainly not God, and a view from nowhere is absurd, since any point of view is a point of view from somewhere. Philosophers no less than ordinary human beings cannot step outside the human situation. And even if Putnam's argument is not full-proof, it clearly illustrates the kind of worldviews that are entailed by recent discussions of the realism question, that which Michael Dummett has called "the greatest question of metaphysics."

Putnam's injunctions against an absolute set of things-in-themselves "out there," or an ultimate foundation for our beliefs resemble to some extent Quine's thesis on ontological relativity, or Donald Davidson's criticism of the "scheme-content" distinction. But unlike Quine or Davidson, Putnam has extended this approach to the moral and political sphere, arguing that the collapse of the absolutist perspective in epistemology and metaphyics makes it possible to affirm the genuineness of moral, political, and other kinds of norm-governed discourse. If the concepts of truth or objectivity are not defined in terms of some relation to mind-independent objects, but are rather linked to our practices of evaluation and deliberation, then the way is open to construe moral and political claims as "objective" and "truthful" in their own right. Analytic philosophers have historically looked down on ethics and politics as soft and murky areas, where conjecture and speculation abound, but no "results" are to be had. Without denying the differences between the sciences and subjects like ethics or politics, Putnam points out that the absolute distinction between them with respect to claims to truth and objectivity is no longer tenable. The "hard" sciences themselves are normative through and through: the conclusions that are reached as to what theories to adopt, or even what questions to pose, are influenced by the values and belief-systems of practising scientists, and this is not much different from what goes on in moral and political discourse. Recently Putnam has turned to Jurgen Habermas's theory of "ideal communication" as a way to show how moral objectivity might be attained in a modern society which is admittedly subjectivist in character.

With this abandonment of the absolutist approach to epistemology and metaphysics has come a newfound appreciation for American pragmatists such as Charles Pierce, John Dewey, and especially William James. With his wife Ruth Anna, Putnam has written several articles on the Pragmatists and one book (Pragmatism, 1995). While Putnam is not sparing in his criticism of them (he clearly disagrees with Pragmatist theories of truth, for example), he thinks that they represent a certain "worldview" worth returning to, seeing that naturalized epistemology, functionalism, and other materialistic and scientistic views are no longer acceptable. In particular, he finds James's views on perception very useful in dismantling what he calls an "interface conception of the mind," which holds that we do not perceive the world directly, but only through the filter of sense-impressions or mental representations. Putnam uses James (and contemporary "direct" realists on perception such as John McDowell) to mark a return to a "philosophy of the common man," that is, a conception of philosophy that does justice to how ordinary people experience the world. This would mark, as Putnam quotes John Wisdom approvingly, a "journey from the familiar to the familiar," the goal to which modern philosophy should now aspire.

Interestingly, Putnam has also connected this idea of philosophy's return to common experience with an interest in the exigencies of religious experience, as found through the lenses of Soren Kierkegaard, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a personal recovery of his own Judaism. Putnam traces the moral image of "equality among human beings" back through Kant and Rousseau to the bibical tradition. This Judaic contribution to Western Civilization, the idea of universal equality, is indicative of a basic commitment to our fellow human beings, one that belies the relativistic tendencies of much French post-structuralism and even "post-analytical" thinkers in America such as Richard Rorty. Putnam believes that his new religious outlook goes well with his idea that there are plural ways of "taking" reality, and with his views (similar to Dewey's) that pluralism and experimentalism can only be beneficial to humanity.

If there is any "realist with a human face," it is Hilary Putnam. As anyone who has met him personally will testify to, Putnam is quite simply a rare gem of a person in a field of academic grindstones. His honest, unaffected approach to everyone he talks to regardless of their academic rank, his enthusiasm and love for real philosophical discussion, and even his sense of humour and somewhat nerdy laugh, have endeared him to colleagues and students alike for the last four decades. Putnam's legacy lies not merely in the magnificent corpus of his writings, or the philosophical solutions he has proposed, but in the way he has approached the questions. The quote from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet that he selected to preface his Realism with a Human Face captures best the spirit of Putnam's legacy to philosophy: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue... Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."