Hilary Whitehall Putnam was born on 31 July 1926 in Chicago, Illinois. The Harvard Gazette contributors wrote that his ‘influence on analytic philosophy was and remains enormous, ranging widely across fields including mathematical logic, philosophy of science and mathematics, philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics’. Lecturer at Northwestern University in 1952, he moved to Princeton in 1953, followed by MIT in 1961. He held several positions at Harvard beginning in 1965, including Professor of Philosophy, Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, and Cogan University Professor.
President of the American Philosophical Association, he was also Fellow of the British Academy and American Philosophical Society. Putnam was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize and the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy. One major contribution was his Twin-Earth thought experiment which argued that the meanings of words are not entirely psychological. Notable works include a three-volume anthology, Philosophical Papers (1975–1983), and a further two volumes, Realism with a Human Face (1990), and Words and Life (1994). He also wrote Pragmatism: An Open Question (1995).
