Hilary Putnam - Hilary Putnam Hilary Putnam is a key figure in the philosophy of mind during the 20th century. After receiving his BA at Penn (where he was an undergraduate with Noam Chomsky) and PhD at UCLA (under Hans Reichenbach), he taught at Princeton, MIT, and Harvard, where he is now Cogan University Professor emeritus. Putnam has earned a reputation for changing his mind frequently during the course of his career, and he has written on so many diverse topics that it is often difficult to sort out his views. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Philosophy of Mind 2 Philosophy of Language 3 Philosophy of Mathematics 4 Metaphilosophy Philosophy of Mind Putnam is probably most famous for his contributions to the philosophy of mind. He was an early.
George Boolos - kinds. In 1993 he reached the London Regional Final of the London Times crossword competition, where his score was one of the highest recorded by an American. He was a charismatic speaker, well-known for his clarity and wit. One story attributes a precise account of Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem, entirely in words of one syllable. According to another story, at the end of his viva, Hilary Putnam asked him, "And tell us, Mr. Boolos, what does the analytical hierarchy have to do with the real world?" Unhesitating, Boolos replied, "It's part of it". Work He was one of the founders of "provability logic", in which modal logic â the logic of necessity and possibility â is applied to the theory of mathematical proof. One of his books, The Logic of Provability,.
Foundation ontology - mathematics, a foundation ontology is an ontology in the formal philosophical sense that is deemed to play a role in the foundations of mathematics. Most notably, the role played by Plato's ontology in some theories of realism in mathematics. Hilary Putnam made the distinction in 1975, arguing that one could believe in a realist philosophy of mathematical foundations without also accepting Plato's ontology or his sacred geometry, thus the labels "Platonist" and "realist" were not to be held equivalent. This is discussed further in the article on foundations of mathematics..
Functionalism (philosophy of mind) - the senses in humans). Data output (analogous to both behaviour and memory). Functional states (analogous to mental states), The ability to move from one functional state into another. The definition of functional states with reference to the part they play in the operation of the entire entity - ie. in reference to the other functional states. This variety of functionalism was developed by Hilary Putnam. One of the major proponents of functionalism is Jerry Fodor. See also: philosophy of mind.
Donald Davidson (philosopher) - is the case--does not entail that the mind is anything more than the brain. Hence Davidson called his position "anomalous monism": monism, because it claimed that only one substance was at issue in questions of mind and brain; anomalous (from a-, not, and nomos, law) because brain states and mental states could not be connected by laws. In 1972 Davidson published Truth and Meaning, in which he argued that any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions--as we may assume that natural human languages are, at least in principle. If it could not be stated in a finite way than it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way humans learn their.
Brigid Brophy - The Finishing Touch (also see below), Secker & Warburg, 1963, revised edition, GMP (London), 1987. The Snow Ball (also see below), Secker & Warburg, 1964. The Finishing Touch [and] The Snow Ball, World, 1964. The Burglar (play; first produced in London at Vaudeville Theatre, February 22, 1967), Holt (New York, NY), 1968. In Transit: An Heroicycle Novel, Macdonald & Co. (London), 1969, Putnam (New York, NY), 1970, Dalkey Archive Press, (Chicago, IL), 2002. The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl: A Novel and Some Fables, Macmillan (London), 1973, Little, Brown (Boston), 1974. Pussy Owl: Superbeast (for children), illustrated by Hilary Hayton, BBC Publications (London), 1976. Palace without Chairs: A Baroque Novel, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1978. Nonfiction Black Ship to Hell, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962. Mozart.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - question he began with: The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. The Deep Connection between Science and Mathematics Wigner's work provided a fresh insight into both physics and the philosophy of mathematics. Specifically, it speculated on the relationship between the philosophy of science and the foundations of mathematics: "It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the.
Timothy Chambers - Aristotelian Society Proceedings (2000), and Ratio (1999). His interests include Hilary Putnam, time travel, the Ontological Argument, and the semantics of vagueness..
Truth (Serious Account) - the "equivalence condition" that P and "P is true" are equivalent. Second, disquotationalists have further argued that a property (or predicate) satisfying this condition has an important logical use, which permits one to express infinitely many statements all in one go. For example, if we wish to assert each statement that a mathematical theory T proves, we should have to list them all, and then say, one by one: (12) S1, S2, S2, ... The modern deflationists (following W.V. Quine) have pointed out that instead of asserting all of these particular statements, one can instead say simply: (13) All theorems of T are true. So, instead of asserting all the theorems of T one by one, you can simply say a single statement (6), "All theorems of T are true". Well,.
Twin Earth thought experiment - Earth thought experiment was first posed by philosopher Hilary Putnam in 1975. Since then it has inspired a number of variations, which can be collectively referred to as Twin Earth thought experiments. Putnam invites us to consider a planet, indentical to our own in every respect except that the place of water is occupied, not by H20, but by XYZ. The two "waters" are identical in every macroscopic property, although careful chemical analysis would reveal that they are, in fact, different chemically. Now of course there is, on this "twin Earth", a "twin Putnam", so suppose that both of them said something like "water is good for drinking". The argument can be made that when Putnam and twin-Putnam use the term "water", they are really referring to different things. Or are.
Saul Kripke - with the object as mediated through communities of speakers. Kripke also raised the prospect of a posteriori necessitiesâfacts that are necessarily true, though they can be known only through empirical investigation. Examples include âHesperus is Phosphorusâ, âCicero is Tullyâ, and other identity claims where two names refer to the same object. (These two contributionsâcausal reference and a posteriori necessityâhave been echoed by Hilary Putnam, and there is controversy as to whether Kripke was in turn echoing earlier work by Ruth Barcan Marcus.) Finally, Kripke gave an argument against identity materialism in the philosophy of mind, the view that every mental fact is identical with some physical fact. Kripke argued that the only way to defend this identity is as an a posteriori necessary identity, but that such an identityâe.g., pain is.
Sociology of knowledge - 1966, and "The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969, Foucault introduced the abstract notions of mathesis and taxonomia. These, he claimed, had transformed 17th and 18th century studies of "general grammar" into modern "linguistics", "natural history" into modern "biology", and "analysis of wealth" into modern "economics". Not, claimed Foucault, without loss of meaning. The 19th century had transformed what knowledge was. Perhaps Foucault's best-known and most controversial claim was that before the 18th century, "Man did not exist". The notions of humanity and of humanism were inventions or creations of this 19th century transformation. Accordingly, a cognitive bias had been introduced unwittingly into science, by over-trusting the individual doctor or scientist's ability to see and state things objectively. This study still guides sociology of knowledge and has been claimed to have sparked single-handed.
Robert Baden-Powell - doubtless have become Field Marshall, Baden Powell decided to retire from the Army in 1910 on the advice of King Edward VII, who suggested that he could better serve his country by promoting Scouting. In January 1912 Baden-Powell met his future wife Olave Soames on an ocean liner (Arcadia) on the way to New York to start one of his Scouting World Tours. She was 23, he 55, and they shared the same birthday. They became engaged in September of the same year, causing a media sensation. To avoid press intrusion, they married in secret on October 30 1912. On the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Baden-Powell put himself at the disposal of the War Office. No command, however, was given him, for, as Lord Kitchener said: "he could.
Quasi-empiricism in mathematics - by humans have grown together, may simply reflect human cognitive bias, and that the rigorous application of empirical methods or mathematical practice in either field is insufficient to disprove credible alternate approaches. Hilary Putnam argued convincingly in 1975 that real mathematics had accepted informal proofs and proof by authority, and made and corrected errors all through its history, and that Euclid's system of proving theorems about geometry was peculiar to the classical Greeks and did not evolve in other mathematical cultures in China, India, and Arabia. This and other evidence led many mathematicians to reject the label of Platonists, along with Plato's ontology - which, along with the methods and epistemology of Aristotle, had served as a foundation ontology for the Western world since its beginnings. A truly international culture of.
Philosophy of mathematics - the Pythagoreans, who believed that the world was, quite literally, built up by the numbers. This idea may have even older origins that are unknown to us. Many working mathematicians are mathematical realists; they see themselves as discoverers. Examples are Paul Erdös and Kurt Gödel. Psychological reasons have been given for this preference: it appears to be very hard to preoccupy oneself over long periods of time with the investigation of an entity in whose existence one doesn't firmly believe. Gödel believed in an objective mathematical reality that could be perceived in a manner analogous to sense perception. Certain principles (eg, for any two mathematical objects, there is a collection of objects consisting of precisely those two objects) could be directly seen to be true, but some conjectures, like the continuum.
Progress (philosophy) - philosophy. The argument goes something like this: scientific progress is what makes an intellectual effort worthwhile; but there is no hope for scientific progress in philosophy; therefore there is no hope for philosophy to be worthwhile. On this view, philosophy is regarded as a sort of sort of pseudoscience which aspires to scientific progress, but which (by its very nature) can never achieve it; and so it is best abandoned in favor of empirical scientific inquiry. Needless to say, this is not a view that most profesional philosophers are particularly fond of or comfortable with, but it does seem to have been the consensus of the Vienna Circle positivists towards more or less all traditional philosophical inquiry, although not necessarily to the use of philosophical method to get clear on the.
Matiyasevich's theorem - the above system is solvable over the integers if and only if the following equation is solvable over the natural numbers: ( 3(x1 â x2)2(y1 â y2) â 7(y1 â y2)2(z1 â z2)3 â 18 )2 + ( â7(y1 â y2)2 + 8(z1 â z2)2)2 = 0. Matiyasevich utilized an ingenious trick involving Fibonacci numbers in order to show that solutions to Diophantine equations may grow exponentially. Earlier work by Julia Robinson, Martin Davis and Hilary Putnam had shown that this suffices to show that no general algorithm deciding the solvability of Diophantine equations can exist. Later work has shown that the question of solvability of a Diophantine equation is undecidable even if the equation only has 9 natural number variables (Matiyasevich, 1977) or 11 integer variables (Zhi Wei Sun, 1992)..
List of philosophers - (1903-1930) Ayn Rand, (1905-1982) John Rawls, (1921-2002) Hans Reichenbach Thomas Reid, (1710-1796) Ursula Reitemeyer, (born 1955) Richard Rorty, (born 1930?) Gian-Carlo Rota, (1932-1999) Rhazes Jean Jacques Rousseau Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, (1763-1845) Bertrand Russell, (1872-1970) Gilbert Ryle S George Santayana, (1863-1952) Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905-1980) Friedrich Schelling, (1775-1852) Friedrich Schiller, (1759-1805) Friedrich Schleiermacher Moritz Schlick, (1882-1936) Arthur Schopenhauer, (1788-1860) Albert Schweizer John Searle (born 1931?) Wilfrid Sellars, (1912-1989) Michel Serres Sydney Shoemaker Peter Singer Joseph D. Sneed Socrates, (470 BC-399 BC) Herbert Spencer, (1820-1903) Baruch Spinoza, (1632-1677) Lysander Spooner Dugald Stewart, (1753-1828) Max Stirner, (1806-1856) David Friedrich Strauss, (1808-1874) Leo Strauss, (1899-1973) T Charles Taylor Henry David Thoreau Paul Tillich Thales, (circa BC624-BC547) Benjamin Tucker U Miguel de Unamuno V Giambattista Vico, (1668-1744) Eric Voegelin, (1901-1985) Voltaire, (1694-1778) W Alfred North Whitehead, (1861-1947).
List of people by name: Pu - Casimir, (1745-1779), military commander Pulitzer, Joseph, (1847-1911) Puller, Chesty, (1898-1971), U.S. Marine hero Pullman, Bill, (born 1953), US actor Pullman, Philip, (born 1946), English author of His Dark Materials fame Pun, Big, (1971-2000) Pupin, Mihajlo, (1854-1935), Serb Purcell, Henry, (1659-1695), composer Purdon, Jock, (1925-1998), musician Purviance, Edna, (1895-1958), actress Puskas, Ferenc, athlete Putin, Vladimir, (born 1952), President of Russian Federation Putnam, Hilary, (born 1926), philosopher Pu Yi, Henry, (1906-1967), last emperor of China Puzo, Mario, (1920-1999), US Mafia author.
Library of Living Philosophers - (1963); Martin Buber (1967); C. I. Lewis (1968); Karl Popper (1974); Brand Blanshard (1980); Jean-Paul Sartre (1981); Gabriel Marcel (1984); W. V. Quine (1986); Georg Henrik von Wright (1989); Charles Hartshorne (1991); A. J. Ayer (1992); Paul Ricoeur (1995); Paul Weiss (1995); Hans-Georg Gadamer (1997); Roderick M Chisolm (1997); P. F. Strawson (1998); Donald Davidson (1999); Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2000); and Marjorie Grene (2002). Volumes are currently projected on: Arthur C Danto; Michael Dummett; Jaakko Hintikka; Hilary Putnam; and Richard Rorty..
