Hilary Whitehall Putnam was born on July 31, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a scholar of Romance languages, columnist, and translator who wrote for the Daily Worker, a publication … See more

Putnam's best-known work concerns philosophy of mind. His most noted original contributions to that field came in several key papers published in the late 1960s that set out the hypothesis of multiple realizability. … See more

One of Putnam's contributions to philosophy of language is his semantic externalism, the claim that terms' meanings are determined by factors outside the mind, encapsulated in his slogan that "meaning just ain't in the head". His … See more

In the philosophy of mathematics, Putnam has utilized indispensability arguments to argue for a realist interpretation of mathematics. In his 1971 book Philosophy of Logic, he presented what has since been called the … See more

Putnam has contributed to scientific fields not directly related to his work in philosophy. As a mathematician, he contributed to the resolution of Hilbert's tenth problem in mathematics. This problem (now know… See more