Hilary Putnam is Spencer-Leavitt Professor

Hilary Putnam, Cogan Research Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, will speak on "The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy" on Thursday, Sept. 21, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.

Putnam, the Spencer-Leavitt Visiting Professor at Union will be in residency from Sept. 17 through Sept. 23, conducting a series of classes and seminars with the faculty and students in the philosophy department.

His talk is part of the "Perspectives at the Nott" lecture series.

Putnam continues to revolutionize contemporary philosophical thought with his work on the nature of consciousness; artificial intelligence; the mind/body problem; the relation of truth, language and reality; the foundations of mathematics and logic; and the methods and history of philosophical pragmatism.

He has written extensively on the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of natural science, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of the mind. Many of his papers have been collected in three volumes of Philosophical Papers, in Realism with a Human Face, and in Words and Life. He is also the author of a number of books, including most recently Renewing Philosophy and Pragmatism.

Putnam was born in Chicago in 1926, grew up in France and Philadelphia, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in 1951 from UCLA. He has taught at Northwestern and Princeton, and was professor of the philosophy of science at MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard.

He is past president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.