His politics usually ranged from the reprehensible to the inane, and almost always out on the far fringes of the left. His mind was an endlessly changeable place—and whatever the certainty and panache with which he announced a new intellectual position, he would dismiss it a few years later as nonsense unworthy of his intellect. He maneuvered academia with the skill of a born snake-oil salesman, and he wandered from field to field, never content to stick to a single branch of his discipline.
For all that, however, Hilary Putnam was a great American philosopher—a great American mind and a great American eccentric. With a life as full as his, lived to age 89, his death March 13 cannot be called an unexpected tragedy. But it is still a loss. In terms of pure philosophy, the abstract stuff of precise definition and abstruse question, he was the most powerful American thinker since Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey.
Where those earlier philosophers were all pragmatists, of one stripe or another, Putnam was trained up in the later schools of logical positivism (which, in rebellion against his teachers, he would rage against for most of his career) and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Despite his forays into execrable Marxist politics and his few ventures into philosophical ethics, he was at heart a follower of the colder, harder branches of philosophy: a logician, a theorist of mathematics, a language analyst, and an epistemologist.
Along the way, he developed a talent for creating thought experiments that would set the philosophical world afire with argument—arguments that he would often join by arguing against himself. His Brain in a Vat thought experiment, for example, seemed the freshest refutation of radical skepticism since Descartes. His Twin Earths thought experiment remains a fascinating idea about the reference of language to objects outside the mind. He was, in many ways, the last great defender of philosophical realism in academic Anglo-American thought, as the analytic traditions he knew gradually spiraled down into skepticism and social constructivism. Even when, in the 1980s, he abandoned many of his old defenses of realism, he still argued for at least an internal realism that recognizes the being of the external world.
Attempting to rediscover in adulthood the Judaism that his parents had abandoned, Putnam brought up his children in a Jewish household—and underwent a Bar Mitzvah for himself in 1994, at age 68. In 2008, he published Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life, a reading of Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, and Wittgenstein. The later names in that list suggest the direction he was forced to take in the book. Putnam had an allergy to classical metaphysics, coupled with a mistrust of mysticism. One of his books, for instance, was titled Ethics Without Ontology, and his most famous defense of mathematics begins with the claim that we must have intellectual commitments only to entities that are indispensable for science. He could not succeed in his attempts to identify a religiously tinged ethics, a Jewish anthropology of the good life, without deep philosophical and theological commitments to God.
Even so, his philosophical musings about religion were interesting—as Putnam’s philosophy was always interesting, even at its strangest and most febrile. The Scrapbook has little agreement with the many different positions Hilary Putnam took in his long philosophical career. But how can we not mourn the loss of such an extravagantly gifted American mind?
