Students and scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines will be familiar with Hilary Putnam. Born in Chicago, in 1926, to secular-Jewish parents who championed Communism, a political cause he likewise espoused for much of his life, Putnam turned to Judaism and Jewish philosophy toward the end of his life.
Putnam was a philosopher of science (with a self-admitted broadly defined conception thereof) and a major force in the Analytic fields of the philosophies of mind, language, and math. He joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1965. His habit of submitting his own positions to the same focused analysis and scrutiny that he so effectively levied against his interlocutors and philosophical opponents and adjusting accordingly led him to become known as something of a flip-flopper (a reputation usually as unwelcome to a scholar as it is to a politician).
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