2 - Overview

Summary

Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse-beat, snort and adenoid, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakable American way, and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan and inordinate abattoir by Lake Michigan.

H. L. Mencken (Dedmon 1953: 283)

Hilary Putnam was born in Chicago in 1926, the son of an author and translator (Samuel Putnam). When he arrived there from New York six years later, Milton Friedman found Chicago to be a “new, raw city bursting with energy, far less sophisticated than New York, but for that very reason far more tolerant of diversity, of heterodox ideas” (Atlas 2000: 6). There is no particular reason to expect instructive parallels between philosophers and their native cities. But the reflection is irresistible in this case. Putnam has an unmistakably American way of doing philosophy and of writing it. Moreover, his approach to the subject has always been open-minded and his voice dissenting, unorthodox, nonconformist.

Putnam moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1934. He remained in the city for his undergraduate studies in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1948. He then transferred to Los Angeles, where he was supervised in his doctoral work at UCLA by Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953). Reichenbach was later identified by Putnam as one of “the two philosophers who have had the greatest influence on my own philosophical work” (Putnam 1975e: 153).