THE BLOG
Hilary Putnam (1926-2016)
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Philosophy is pretty unpopular in America today. Marco Rubio says,
with typical inelegance: "We need more welders and less philosophers."
Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina also singles out philosophy as a
discipline offering "worthless courses" that offer "no chances of
getting people jobs." Across the nation there's unbounded adulation for
the STEM disciplines, which seem so profitable. Although all the
humanities suffer disdain, philosophy keeps on attracting special
negative attention -- perhaps because in addition to appearing
worthless, it also appears vaguely subversive, a threat to sound
traditional values.
Such was not always the case. Throughout its history in Europe,
philosophy has repeatedly come in for abuse from the forces of tradition
and authority. The American founding, however, was different: the
founders were men of the Enlightenment, steeped in the ideas and works
of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and the ancient Greeks and Romans
-- especially Cicero and the Roman Stoics. As men of the Enlightenment
they took pride in steering their course by reason and argument rather
than unexamined tradition. Their intellectual independence and
theoretical thoughtfulness served them well when it came to setting up a
new nation. We've traveled a long way from those roots, and not in a
good direction.
On March 13, America lost one of the greatest philosophers this
nation has ever produced. Hilary Putnam died of cancer at the age of 89.
Those of us who had the good fortune to know Putnam as mentees,
colleagues, and friends remember his life with profound gratitude and
love, since Hilary was not only a great philosopher, but also a human
being of extraordinary generosity, who really wanted people to be
themselves, not his acolytes. But it's also good, in the midst of grief,
to reflect about Hilary's career, and what it shows us about what
philosophy is and what it can offer humanity. For Hilary was a person of
unsurpassed brilliance, but he also believed that philosophy was not
just for the rarely gifted individual. Like two of his favorites,
Socrates and John Dewey (and, I'd add, like those American founders), he
thought that philosophy was for all human beings, a wake-up call to the
humanity in us all.
Putnam was a philosopher of amazing breadth. As he himself wrote,
"Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one." And in
his prolific career Putnam, accordingly, elaborated detailed and
creative accounts of central issues in an extremely wide range of areas
in philosophy. Indeed there is no philosopher since Aristotle who has
made creative and foundational contributions in all the following areas:
logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, metaphysics,
philosophy of mind, ethics, political thought, philosophy of economics.
philosophy of literature.
And Putnam added at least two areas to the list that Aristotle didn't
work in, namely, philosophy of language and philosophy of religion.
(Philosophy of religion because he was a religious Jew, and he
understood Judaism to require a life of perpetual critique.) In all of
these areas, too, he shared with Aristotle a deep concern: that the
messy matter of human life should not be distorted to fit the demands of
an excessively simple theory, that what Putnam called "the whole
hurly-burly of human actions" should be the context within which
philosophical theory does its work.
That commitment led him to oppose many fads of his time: for
philosophy is prone to simplifying and reductive fads, from logical
positivism to a later fad for computer modeling of philosophical
problems. Putnam knew physics like virtually nobody else in the field,
and so he also knew that it was fatal to reduce philosophy to physics:
philosophy is a humanistic discipline. (I remember a marvelous and
profoundly countercultural course he taught at Harvard, in the days when
logical positivism was just beginning to wane, entitled "Non-Scientific
Knowledge." It covered ethical knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, and
religious knowledge, and Putnam showed the folly of imagining that
physical reductionism could replace those normative subjects.) His
independence from fads also led him to take a keen interest in the
thought of the ancient Greeks, who looked stupid to the positivists but
who actually had a few good ideas! He learned ancient Greek in order to
work seriously on Aristotle, and he argued that Aristotle had important
insights about the mind-body relationship that contemporary thinkers
ought to take up.
At the same time, and again like Aristotle, Putnam never gave way to
irrationalism, never took up a skeptical and dismissive attitude to
philosophical theorizing: for, as he stressed, the attempt to order our
world by the work of reason is one of the most deep and pervasive
aspects of the hurly burly of human life. He believed that we are
always prone to not just messiness and sloppiness, but, worse, to
capitulation to forms of authority and pressure, and that the work of
philosophy was needed to counter these baneful tendencies.
Most philosophers talk a lot of talk about following the argument,
but eventually lapse into dogmatism, defending a well-known position at
all costs, no matter what new argument comes along. The glory of
Putnam's way of philosophizing was its total vulnerability. Because he
really did follow the argument wherever it led, he often changed his
views, and being led to change was to him not distressing but profoundly
delightful, evidence that he was humble enough to be worthy of his own
rationality. Once in the late 1970's he offered a class on metaphysics
at Harvard with his colleagues Nelson Goodman and W. V. O. Quine. The
other two held views very different from Putnam's, and they argued well.
Putnam became more and more excited by the debate -- so much so that
he would leave a department meeting in the middle of lunch to walk up
and down the halls with Goodman. At the end of that term, his
Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association contained
an elegant argument against himself -- somewhat in Goodman's spirit,
though not exactly.
A life in reason was and is difficult. All of us, whether we are
ignorant of philosophy or professors of philosophy, find it easier to
follow dogma than to think. What Hilary Putnam's life offers our
troubled nation is, I think, a noble paradigm of a perpetual willingness
to subject oneself to reason's critique. Our country, founded by lovers
of argument, has become the plaything of rhetoricians and entertainers
(characters that Plato knew all too well). On this day when we have
lost one of the giants of our nation, let's think about that.