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Hilary Putnam is the Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, Harvard University. He is the author of Realism with a Human Face and Words and Life (both from Harvard).
Hilary Putnam, one of America's most distinguished philosophers, surveys an astonishingly wide range of issues and proposes a new, clear-cut approach to philosophical questions -- a renewal of philosophy. He contests the view that only science offers an appropriate model for philosophical inquiry. His discussion of topics from artificial intelligence to natural selection, and of reductive philosophical views derived from these models, identifies the insuperable problems encountered when philosophy ignores the normative or attempts to reduce it to something else.
"In this bold, energetic, and extensive work, Putnam undertakes a revitalization of philosophy. He wants to put philosophy back in touch with the 'human issues which it has always been philosophy's highest goal to articulate' . . . This is exciting and engaging stuff, and anyone with an interest in philosophy, at whatever level, will enjoy it and learn from it.
- A. W. Moore, Times Literary Supplement
"Putnam has become a thinker to be reckoned with in the humanities, and Renewing Philosophy should provide the best approach to his thought."
- David Gorman, Philosophy and Literature