The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam

THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

PAUL ARTHUR SCHILPP, FOUNDER AND EDITOR 1939–1981

LEWIS EDWIN HAHN, EDITOR 1981–2001

RANDALL E. AUXIER, EDITOR 2001–2013

DOUGLAS R. ANDERSON, EDITOR 2014

Paul Arthur Schilpp, Editor

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN DEWEY (1939, 1971, 1989)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE SANTAYANA (1940, 1951)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD (1941, 1951)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF G. E. MOORE (1942, 1971)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL (1944, 1971)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ERNST CASSIRER (1949)

ALBERT EINSTEIN: PHILOSOPHER-SCIENTIST (1949, 1970)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SARVEPALLI RADHAKRISHNAN (1952)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF KARL JASPERS (1957; AUG. ED., 1981)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF C. D. BROAD (1959)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RUDOLF CARNAP (1963)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF C. I. LEWIS (1968)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF KARL POPPER (1974)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BRAND BLANSHARD (1980)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1981)

Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARTIN BUBER (1967)

Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF GABRIEL MARCEL (1984)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF W. V. QUINE (1986, AUG. ED., 1998)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF GEORG HENRIK VON WRIGHT (1989)

Lewis Edwin Hahn, Editor

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHARLES HARTSHORNE (1991)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF A. J. AYER (1992)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PAUL RICOEUR (1995)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PAUL WEISS (1995)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HANS-GEORG GADAMER (1997)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RODERICK M. CHISHOLM (1997)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF P. F. STRAWSON (1998)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DONALD DAVIDSON (1999)

Lewis Edwin Hahn, Randall E. Auxier, and Lucian W. Stone, Jr., Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR (2001)

Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARJORIE GRENE (2002)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JAAKKO HINTIKKA (2006)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MICHAEL DUMMETT (2007)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RICHARD RORTY (2010)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ARTHUR C. DANTO (2013)

Randall E. Auxier, Douglas R. Anderson, and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM (2015)

In Preparation:

THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBERTO ECO

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JULIA KRISTEVA

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARTHA NUSSBAUM

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM

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Copyright © 2015 by The Library of Living Philosophers

First printing 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The philosophy of Hilary Putnam / edited by Randall E. Auxier, Douglas R. Anderson, and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

pages cm. — (Library of living philosophers; volume XXXIV)

Summary: This volume consists of an intellectual autobiography by world-renowned philosopher Hilary Putnam, 26 critical or descriptive essays, 26 replies by Hilary Putnam, and a bibliography listing all of Putnam’s published writings— Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8126-9898-5

1. Putnam, Hilary. I. Auxier, Randall E., 1961– editor. II. Anderson, Douglas R., editor. III. Hahn, Lewis Edwin, 1908–2004, editor.

B945.P874P49 2015

191—dc23

2015003628

The Library of Living Philosophers is published under the sponsorship of Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

Since its founding in 1938 by Paul Arthur Schilpp, the Library of Living Philosophers has been devoted to critical analysis and discussion of some of the world’s greatest living philosophers. The format for the series provides for creating in each volume a dialogue between the critics and the great philosopher. The aim is not refutation or confrontation but rather fruitful joining of issues and improved understanding of the positions and issues involved. That is, the goal is not overcoming those who differ from us philosophically but interacting creatively with them.

The basic idea for the series, according to Professor Schilpp’s general introduction to the earlier volumes, came from the late F.C.S. Schiller’s essay Must Philosophers Disagree? While Schiller may have been overly optimistic about ending interminable controversies in this way, it seems clear that directing searching questions to great philosophers about what they really mean or how they might resolve or address difficulties in their philosophies can produce far greater clarity of understanding and more fruitful philosophizing than would otherwise exist.

To Paul Arthur Schilpp’s undying credit, he acted on this basic thought in launching the Library of Living Philosophers. The general plan for the volumes has sometimes been altered to fit circumstances, but in ways that have well served the mission of the series. The intellectual autobiographies, or, in a few cases, the biographies, shed a great deal of light on both how the philosophies of the great thinkers developed and the major philosophical movements and issues of their time; and many of our great philosophers seek to orient their outlook not merely to their contemporaries but also to what they find most important in earlier philosophers. The critical perspectives of our distinguished contributors have often stood on their own as landmark studies, widely cited and familiar not only to subsequent specialists, but frequently discussed in their own right as pieces of great philosophy. The bibliography helps to provide ready access to the featured scholar’s writings and thought.

There is no reason to alter our historical format or mission for the present century. We are pleased that the success of the Library of Living Philosophers has led to a wider appreciation of the need for dialogue of the type our format creates. We respect the efforts of other academic publishers to employ versions of our format to facilitate pluralistic, meaningful, sharp, constructive, and respectful exchange in philosophical ideas. We are fortunate to have such support from the Open Court Publishing Company, the Edward C. Hegeler Foundation, and the Board of Trustees, College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of Philosophy of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, as to permit us to carry out our purpose with a degree of deliberate thoroughness and comprehensiveness not available to other academic publishers, and we have rededicated ourselves to maintaining the highest standards in scholarship and accuracy anywhere to be found in academic publishing. In recognition of the permanent value that has been accorded our previous volumes, we are committed to keeping our volumes in print and available, and to maintaining our sense of the long-term importance of providing the most reliable source for scholarly analysis by the most distinguished voices of our day about the most important philosophical contributions of the greatest living thinkers.

The Library of Living Philosophers has never construed philosophy in a narrow and strictly academic sense. Past volumes have been dedicated both to the leading academic philosophers and to the most visible and influential public philosophers. We renew with each volume our historical orientation to the practice of philosophy as a quest for truth, beauty, and the best life, and we affirm that this quest is a public activity and its results a public possession, both for the present generation and in the future. We seek, with the sober judgment of our Advisory Board, to bring forth volumes on the thought of figures whose ideas have made a genuine difference to the lives of people everywhere. Ideas truly do have consequences, and many of the ideas that have had the broadest impact were indeed best articulated by the figures to whom we have dedicated past volumes. The selfless work of Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn in realizing this mission stands among the most important scholarly contributions to twentieth-century philosophy. Their judgment regarding how best to pursue the purposes of the Library of Living Philosophers has found constant and continuous confirmation in the reception and ongoing importance accorded this series. Let us continue in their footsteps as well as we may.

RANDALL E. AUXIER

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CARBONDALE

FOUNDER’S GENERAL INTRODUCTION* TO THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

According to the late F. C. S. Schiller, the greatest obstacle to fruitful discussion in philosophy is the curious etiquette which apparently taboos the asking of questions about a philosopher’s meaning while he is alive. The interminable controversies which fill the histories of philosophy, he goes on to say, could have been ended at once by asking the living philosophers a few searching questions.

The confident optimism of this last remark undoubtedly goes too far. Living thinkers have often been asked a few searching questions, but their answers have not stopped interminable controversies about their real meaning. It is nonetheless true that there would be far greater clarity of understanding than is now often the case if more such searching questions had been directed to great thinkers while they were still alive.

This, at any rate, is the basic thought behind the present undertaking. The volumes of the Library of Living Philosophers can in no sense take the place of the major writings of great and original thinkers. Students who would know the philosophies of such men as John Dewey, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Jaspers, Rudolf Carnap, Martin Buber, et al., will still need to read the writings of these men. There is no substitute for first-hand contact with the original thought of the philosopher himself. Least of all does this Library pretend to be such a substitute. The Library in fact will spare neither effort nor expense in offering to the student the best possible guide to the published writings of a given thinker. We shall attempt to meet this aim by providing at the end of each volume in our series as nearly complete a bibliography of the published work of the philosopher in question as possible. Nor should one overlook the fact that essays in each volume cannot but finally lead to this same goal. The interpretive and critical discussions of the various phases of a great thinker’s work and, most of all, the reply of the thinker himself, are bound to lead the reader to the works of the philosopher himself.

At the same time, there is no denying that different experts find different ideas in the writings of the same philosopher. This is as true of the appreciative interpreter and grateful disciple as it is of the critical opponent. Nor can it be denied that such differences of reading and of interpretation on the part of other experts often leave the neophyte aghast before the whole maze of widely varying and even opposing interpretations. Who is right and whose interpretation shall he accept? When the doctors disagree among themselves, what is the poor student to do? If, in desperation, he decides that all of the interpreters are probably wrong and that the only thing for him to do is to go back to the original writings of the philosopher himself and then make his own decision—uninfluenced (as if this were possible) by the interpretation of anyone else—the result is not that he has actually come to the meaning of the original philosopher himself, but rather that he has set up one more interpretation, which may differ to a greater or lesser degree from the interpretations already existing. It is clear that in this direction lies chaos, just the kind of chaos which Schiller has so graphically and inimitably described.**

It is curious that until now no way of escaping this difficulty has been seriously considered. It has not occurred to students of philosophy that one effective way of meeting the problem at least partially is to put these varying interpretations and critiques before the philosopher while he is still alive and to ask him to act at one and the same time as both defendant and judge. If the world’s greatest living philosophers can be induced to cooperate in an enterprise whereby their own work can, at least to some extent, be saved from becoming merely desiccated lecture-fodder, which on the one hand provides innocuous sustenance for ruminant professors, and on the other hand gives an opportunity to such ruminants and their understudies to speculate safely, endlessly, and fruitlessly, about what a philosopher must have meant (Schiller), they will have taken a long step toward making their intentions more clearly comprehensible.

With this in mind, the Library of Living Philosophers expects to publish at more or less regular intervals a volume on each of the greater among the world’s living philosophers. In each case it will be the purpose of the editor of the Library to bring together in the volume the interpretations and criticisms of a wide range of that particular thinker’s scholarly contemporaries, each of whom will be given a free hand to discuss the specific phase of the thinker’s work that has been assigned to him. All contributed essays will finally be submitted to the philosopher with whose work and thought they are concerned, for his careful perusal and reply. And, although it would be expecting too much to imagine that the philosopher’s reply will be able to stop all differences of interpretation and of critique, this should at least serve the purpose of stopping certain of the grosser and more general kinds of misinterpretations. If no further gain than this were to come from the present and projected volumes of this Library, it would seem to be fully justified.

In carrying out this principal purpose of the Library, the editor announces that (as far as is humanly possible) each volume will contain the following elements:

First, an intellectual autobiography of the thinker whenever this can be secured; in any case an authoritative and authorized biography;

Second, a series of expository and critical articles written by the leading exponents and opponents of the philosopher’s thought;

Third, the reply to the critics and commentators by the philosopher himself; and

Fourth, a bibliography of writings of the philosopher to provide a ready instrument to give access to his writings and thought.

PAUL ARTHUR SCHILPP

FOUNDER AND EDITOR, 1939–1981

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CARBONDALE

*This General Introduction sets forth in the founder’s words the underlying conception of the Library. —R. E. A.

**In his essay Must Philosophers Disagree? in the volume of the same title (London: Macmillan, 1934), from which the above quotations were taken.

ADVISORY BOARD

THOMAS ALEXANDER*

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

THOMAS O. BUFORD*

Furman University

EDWARD S. CASEY*

State University of New York at Stony Brook

PETER J. CAWS

George Washington University

RICHARD DE GEORGE

University of Kansas

ELIZABETH R. EAMES

(Resigned)

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

RALPH D. ELLIS*

Clark Atlanta University

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY

California State University, Bakersfield

WILLIAM L. MCBRIDE

Purdue University

ANDREW J. RECK

(Resigned)

Tulane University

BARRY SMITH

State University of New York at Buffalo

* Added to the Board after the subject of this volume was chosen.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FRONTISPIECE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

FOUNDER’S GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

ADVISORY BOARD

PREFACE

PART ONE:INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM

SAMPLE OF PUTNAM’S HANDWRITING

INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM

PART TWO:DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL ESSAYS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM WITH REPLIES

I.PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS

1.CHARLES PARSONS: Putnam on Realism and Empiricism in Mathematics

REPLY TO CHARLES PARSONS

2.HARTRY FIELD: Mathematical Undecidables, Metaphysical Realism, and Equivalent Descriptions

REPLY TO HARTRY FIELD

3.FELIX MÜLHÖLZER: Putnam, Wittgenstein, and the Objectivity of Mathematics

REPLY TO FELIX MÜLHÖLZER

4.STEVEN J. WAGNER: Modal and Objectual

REPLY TO STEVEN J. WAGNER

5.GEOFFREY HELLMAN: Infinite Possibilities and Possibilities of Infinity

REPLY TO GEOFFREY HELLMAN

II.LOGIC AND LANGUAGE

6.CHARLES TRAVIS: Engaging

REPLY TO CHARLES TRAVIS

7.ALAN BERGER: What Does It Mean to Say "Water is Necessarily H2O"?

REPLY TO ALAN BERGER

8.IAN HACKING: Natural Kinds, Hidden Structures, and Pragmatic Instincts

REPLY TO IAN HACKING

9.ROBERT K. SHOPE: The State of Affairs Regarding True Assertions

REPLY TO ROBERT K. SHOPE

10.GARY EBBS: Putnam and the Contextually A Priori

REPLY TO GARY EBBS

11.MICHAEL DUMMETT: What Do Permutation Arguments Prove?

REPLY TO MICHAEL DUMMETT

III.KNOWING AND BEING

12.YEMIMA BEN-MENAHEM: Revisiting the Refutation of Conventionalism

REPLY TO YEMIMA BEN-MENAHEM

13.TIM MAUDLIN: Confessions of a Hardcore, Unsophisticated Metaphysical Realist

REPLY TO TIM MAUDLIN

14.FREDERICK STOUTLAND: Putnam and Wittgenstein

REPLY TO FREDERICK STOUTLAND

15.CARL POSY: Realism, Reference, and Reason: Remarks on Putnam and Kant

REPLY TO CARL POSY

16.CORA DIAMOND: Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing: Variations on a Theme

REPLY TO CORA DIAMOND

17.JOHN MCDOWELL: Putnam on Natural Realism

REPLY TO JOHN MCDOWELL

IV.PHILOSOPHER OF PRACTICE

18.PIERRE HADOT: Words in Life: Philosophy as Education for Grownups

REPLY TO PIERRE HADOT

19.JOHN HALDANE: Philosophy, Causality, and God

REPLY TO JOHN HALDANE

20.RUTH ANNA PUTNAM: Hilary Putnam’s Jewish Philosophy

REPLY TO RUTH ANNA PUTNAM

21.SIMON BLACKBURN: Putnam on Wittgenstein and Religious Language

REPLY TO SIMON BLACKBURN

22.CORNEL WEST: Hilary Putnam and the Third Enlightenment

REPLY TO CORNEL WEST

V.ELEMENTS OF PRAGMATISM

23.LARRY A. HICKMAN: Putnam’s Progress: The Deweyan Deposit In His Thinking

REPLY TO LARRY A. HICKMAN

24.HARVEY CORMIER: What Is the Use of Calling Putnam a Pragmatist?

REPLY TO HARVEY CORMIER

25.MARCIN KILANOWSKI: Toward a Responsible and Rational Ethical Discussion: A Critique of Putnam’s Pragmatic Approach

REPLY TO MARCIN KILANOWSKI

26.RICHARD RORTY: Putnam, Pragmatism, and Parmenides

REPLY TO RICHARD RORTY

PART THREE:BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF HILARY PUTNAM

INDEX

PREFACE

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.¹

—EMERSON

The prefaces to our volumes are rare opportunities to characterize a great mind and a complete human being, together and as a whole, from the standpoint of those who have been privileged to spend extensive time in study of both primary and secondary works, to meet, to converse, and to have carried on extensive correspondence with both the principal subject of the volume and some two dozen of the ablest critics. In the years that it takes to prepare a volume in the Library of Living Philosophers, it is possible, then, for us to reflect upon those qualities of mind that have distinguished a philosopher and which have taken that philosophy, itself, to a level of permanent human significance. Virtues come to the fore, as do challenges and even defects that have been overcome, in this longitudinal kind of study. By the time a philosopher has been elected by our Advisory Board to be treated in a volume, it is obvious to everyone, within the discipline and beyond it, that the philosopher’s achievement has been extraordinary.

THE OTHER HALF OF THE STORY

Hilary Putnam, Cogan University Professor Emeritus of Harvard, has always been a model, both personally and intellectually, of numerous humane virtues, and I think the virtues that reveal the most about his achievement are his genuineness and his courage, in several complementary senses of that ancient virtue. But before launching into a consideration of courage, one thing really has to be made clear. Ruth Anna Putnam is an integral part of any story about what they achieved together, in every sense. There can really be no discussion of the qualities of Hilary Putnam’s mind, his character, his honors and achievements, his insights, and (most importantly) his development, that does not credit from the start the idea that the completed human being is part of a family and, in this case, also half of a marriage, which explains far more about who he is than one can read in any book or article he ever wrote, with the possible exception of the Intellectual Autobiography in this volume.

The Putnams came to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale in 2001. The main purpose of their trip was to examine some of the scholarly papers, correspondence, and ephemera held in Morris Library from the estate of Samuel Putnam, Hilary’s father, who was an important humanist, translator, scholar, journalist, and activist.² At that time, Ruth Anna had not yet been invited to contribute an essay to the volume—after all, the aim of the volume is to collect the finest critics of a philosopher’s thought. Perhaps the venerable Professor Hahn, who announced the present volume and at that time had just retired as Editor, assumed, in his delightful, gentlemanly, and old-fashioned way, that Ruth Anna, distinguished philosopher though she is, would prefer not to receive such an assignment as to criticize her husband! Everyone knew that she had some sharp philosophical differences with Hilary (their philosophical exchanges have not been a private matter). Still, one would normally not wish to invite devoted partners to square off for the ages. But on that trip in 2001, Ruth Anna said to me that she did in fact want to contribute to the volume, and, she said, "I promise to be critical!" I do not believe she ever really had any qualms about being critical of Hilary’s ideas, and the invitation would certainly have been forthcoming even without the promise, but anyone who knows the couple is now smiling. I think it is important to record that pleasant fact about this moment in history and of the Putnams’ lives, for those who would not learn it otherwise.

The point is that Hilary’s virtues cannot possibly be separated from Ruth Anna’s. Of course, hypothetically, if anyone were qualified to parse the modal logic we would need to assess sentences about what might have been Hilary’s character without having shared a full life with Ruth Anna, Hilary would be the person to do it. The trouble is that the posited universe of discourse is not a nearby possible world, and no Kripke frame will provide an accessibility relation. I can almost hear Hilary saying that it is hard to analyze what cannot even be imagined. Below, then, is a discussion of Hilary Putnam’s courage, and of his genuineness, and how these characters permeate his intellectual achievements and his life. But these are characters of a shared life, one that never allowed body and mind, action and thought, fact and value, or Ruth Anna and Hilary to grow apart.

A MOMENT IN TIME

Hilary Putnam spoke to a packed auditorium in Atlanta in 1991. Like Emerson before him, he has spoken to appreciative audiences nearly everywhere, even if some were a bit quarrelsome. Had he so desired, Putnam surely could have left teaching and secured a fine living on that circuit alone by the mid-1980s. On this occasion, he spoke on the topic of William James at Emory University on a fall evening. A few of us had the nerve, if not quite the courage (in the mature sense), to ask some pointed questions. There were deep difficulties at that moment in time in the philosophy profession, and these questions were supposed to lay a stumbling block before the speaker. Young people who are experiencing their early disappointments with the world are apt to throw such frustrations back upon the elders, as symbols of the status quo, and they often do so without great discretion. Everyone there was about to receive a benevolent lesson in courage, and in genuineness. The moment contains a key to a puzzle. We shall return to it.

SERVING TWO MASTERS

It is not easy to understand courage. It comes in different colors and stripes; it leaves such varied traces. Even Plato struggled to characterize it, offering a number of unsatisfactory answers, most notably that courage, for guardians of the city, at least, is believing what they have been taught by their betters and acting on that teaching without question. Not many people today could accept such a view, especially for our guardians, but then, not many accepted it during Plato’s time either, including Plato himself, for all we know. Yet, there is something in Plato’s point, as always. We cannot let ourselves lose it altogether.

Others, following Aristotle, point out that courage, as applied to action, is a mean between rashness and cowardice, or, relative to feeling, that it is a kind of resolve about doing one’s duty either without excessive fear or in spite of it. There is a permanent insight here as well. The thoughts of Plato and Aristotle set the agenda for the rest of us, and in general that is a fortunate thing, even if it sometimes bedevils us all. Emerson appreciated both Plato and Aristotle. And he learned reverence and wonder, among other places, in Goethe’s parlor. Goethe said this:

Plato relates himself to the world as a blessed spirit, whom it pleases sometimes to stay for a while in the world; he is not so much concerned to come to know the world, because he already presupposes it, as to communicate to it in a friendly way what he brings along with him and what it needs. He penetrates into the depths more in order to fill them with his being than in order to investigate them. He moves longingly to the heights in order to become again a part of his origin. Everything that he utters is related to an eternal One, Good, True, Beautiful, whose demands he strives to enliven in his bosom . . . . Aristotle, on the contrary, stands to the world as a man, an architect. He is only here once and must here make and create. He inquires about the earth, but not farther than to find a ground . . . . He draws a huge circumference for his building, procures materials from all sides, arranges them, piles them up, and climbs thus in regular form, pyramid fashion to the top; whereas Plato, like an obelisk, indeed like a pointed flame, seeks heaven. When two such men appear, who as it were, share humanity as separate representatives of splendid but not easily reconcilable properties, when they had the fortune to educate themselves fully, to utter their education completely . . . when their works for the best part remain to mankind and are more or less continuously studied and reflected on: it naturally follows that the world, insofar as it is regarded as feeling and thinking, was compelled to surrender itself to one or the other, to recognize one or the other as master, teacher, and leader.³

Granting Goethe’s point, nevertheless, concerning any matter of real depth, to choose just one of these masters to the complete exclusion of the other is to err. Putnam characterizes the age of Aristotle and Plato as the first Enlightenment of the Western world, marking the appearance on the philosophical scene of what he calls reflective transcendence.⁴

The phrase sounds like something straight from Emerson’s journals. Reflective transcendence increases our tolerance for ambiguity, for holding on to creative tension. Must we choose between Plato and Aristotle? Emerson would not make a mistake like that any more than Putnam would, at least not during a time of Enlightenment, such as the one Putnam believes we now live in, with the ongoing unfolding of a democratic vision articulated by the pragmatists in North America. Persons are puzzles, Emerson said, but then there comes a moment when the key to the man, or to the woman, is apparent.

WONDER AND REVERENCE

To hold to both Plato and Aristotle as master, teacher, and leader, Emerson places courage alongside disinterestedness and practical power as the three qualities which conspicuously attract the wonder and reverence of mankind.⁵

The first of these involves the ability to look upon desirable things or self-interested courses of action without experiencing any temptation to obtain or follow them. The second is the ability to start with nothing but one’s hands, intelligence, and will, combining them to accomplish great purposes that would overwhelm most people. This practical power is especially obvious when, for instance, one needs to win a war or a battle, but also is illustrated in building a city or in making peace. These two, then, disinterestedness and practical power, and especially the third quality, courage, attract wonder and reverence. Yet, it is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue. Still, "it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.⁶ Such a person is a wonderful presence, in the original sense of the adjective.

Putnam, along with the wise worthies of the American philosophical tradition, avoids simplistic formulas. Here Emerson guides that tradition by making room for the individual enactment of courage in the context of a quality of character, a kind of free constitution, that is social, through and through. He always insisted that it is easier to communicate a form than to pass along its virtue. We can see the adaptation of Plato’s tenacious steadfastness in following what our betters have told us to Aristotle’s mean, once we remove the merely abstract conviction that there must be an inflexible essence. To grasp Putnam’s courage, therefore, requires that we understand how he did what he did when free to do what was in his constitution to do—and this was much of the time. We are now in a position to take stock.

BACK IN THE LECTURE HALL

Back in the lecture hall in 1991, this was not Putnam’s usual audience. These scholars and teachers were humanistic practitioners of a perennial philosophy, a pursuit of wisdom more than of knowledge. They take the history of philosophy, and not language analysis, to be a course of study more fit to human aspirations and limitations. They have been ill-treated by the dominant models of scientific philosophy. The question was asked: Are you saying that we wasted the last half century in philosophy? A pause. The questioner wanted justification for a half century of slights and jeers directed at himself and his intellectual kin; he wanted, quite unreasonably, some apology and admission of a mistake on the part of those who had mocked or ignored James and so many like him.

A FREE CONSTITUTION

For most of his career, Putnam occupied a position of influence, power, even celebrity. Certain kinds of choices are available to persons so situated that are beyond the reach of most people. There is a kind of freedom in it, although the exercise of that freedom comes at a cost, and the freer one is, the higher the cost. A paragraph often attributed to Emerson runs as follows:

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.⁷

Although Emerson did not write this, it addresses his idea about what inspires reverence and wonder. Note how the epigram folds in the other two qualities that attract wonder and reverence: disinterestedness as to being tempted to believe one’s critics and practical power in achieving a purpose. It is particularly telling in the inclusion of making peace as one of the great demands on our courage.

Putnam grew up among humanistic, broad-minded, politically leftist scholars. Looking at his work during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s in the philosophy of mathematics and physics, followed by important contributions to the philosophy of language, of mind, and of logic, one would not easily detect this broad background. Yet, the ideas of thinking broadly and being committed to act in service of high ideals are lessons that were provided for him from the cradle. Putnam learned ideals as he learned his name; he always knew that people are prone to misuse power and that all kinds of people, especially ordinary people, must struggle for their dignity. He did not come from an especially privileged family, by Western standards, but from one quite dedicated to the deep value of learning. Is this power?

POWER: PRACTICAL AND PRIVILEGED

It could not have been easy for Putnam to understand his own power within the professional climate as it unfolded in the second half of the twentieth century. He was and is an unassuming servant of ideas, first and foremost. He had come to his position on his merits more than his pedigree and had achieved prominence on the weight of his work. The ideas themselves must carry the case, in the end, he believed. Wherever one can find sound thinking, one really must follow it and add one’s stanza to its long epic. This is the only entitlement of anyone deeply devoted to philosophy. It is not a strategy for getting to Harvard. That one person, due merely to situation or circumstance, should receive a more sympathetic or wider hearing than others of equal merit is not the right norm for progress in our thinking. Putnam will regard this as common sense. The fact is, however, that everyone read what Putnam wrote, whether they wanted to or not, both because of the importance of the ideas and because of the influence of the person who penned them. From beyond the candy store window, where most of us stand, one can scarcely distinguish the deserving from the simply fortunate among those within.

One thing that was clear to hungry waifs standing out in the cold was that Putnam was free to change his mind whenever he wanted to, and that seemed like the exercise of privilege. The others who wielded similar influence came to consider Putnam’s frequent changes of view a sort of adorable quirk. Daniel Dennett famously took Putnam’s first name as a noun for his lexicon:

hilary, n. (from hilary term) A very brief but significant period in the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher. Oh, that’s what I thought three or four hilaries ago.⁸

Coming from Dennett, whatever their differences on functionalism may be, this is not an attack. It is worth noting that the philosopher must be distinguished and the periods, however brief, are significant. That means that most philosophers are not really able (or allowed) to have such episodes. Rather, the seriousness of stating one’s professional views is something repeated all the way from the Little Ivies down to the community colleges. Below these elite levels, changing one’s view is a sign of weakness, at least whenever one looks across the profession or down from one’s own perch. Those in the crystal towers can waffle and waver. In that case, this is the exercise of a prerogative.

The resentment of privilege, on the other hand, also tends to rise from below and converge. In the metaphorical middle, the Purdues and Penn States, the Washington Universities and Universities of Washington of our discipline, to which the unlikely rise and the privileged sink to share large, impersonal departments, there is tremendous pressure to conform to the models established by that upper echelon. Changing one’s mind, even significantly for the better, casts doubt upon the waffler. Naturally, at the same time, a tiny ripple at Harvard can create a tsunami out in the Great Middle.

MAKING WAVES

It took more fortitude on Putnam’s part to handle the response of his mainstream peers (and soon-to-be critics) than to handle the wondering amazement of those on the margins who pursued philosophy by other-than-analytic methods. Many of those latter associated the professional ascendency of language analysis with figures like Putnam himself, although he was never dismissive of any historical approach to philosophy. Still, he was among the pillars of the establishment and a student of Hans Reichenbach, renown both for his personal kindness and his philosophical narrowness. Reverence to accompany our wonder is usually reserved to a later generation, it seems. We cannot distinguish courage from foolhardiness when we are left in its wake.

So it was that Putnam’s change of viewpoint finally asked more than the metaphorical middle could forbear. It was Putnam’s drift toward—and then full conversion to—pragmatism. He had finally hilaried to the point of making himself unacceptable to those who waited upon the slightest Harvard ripple, perceived or real. If there was one thing the world did not need, it was to be reminded of what William James said a century ago or why it was not quite so daft or naïve as we had been told.

Now here was Putnam, enthusiastically reading and defending James—publicly. The abuse of James, especially on the matter of truth, was something of a sport among the first-generation analytic formalists who followed in the train of Bertrand Russell. The ordinary language philosophers and those who were obsessed with Wittgenstein had no interest in James, but he certainly was passé by any standard. By the second generation (recalling that academic generations are only about twenty-five years in duration), no one bothered even to mock James. Putnam often criticizes, and has long done so, those who spend their graduate school years learning who they do not have to read or take seriously. He knew what he criticized first-hand from being more or less constantly surrounded by it. Indeed, he repeated this criticism of narrowness to the surprised crowd gathered in Atlanta in 1991. How can it serve philosophy to substitute jingoism for effort and reflection? Putnam never put up with it. But then, he was free to do what was in his constitution to do.

A LONG AND WINDING ROAD

Being able to change his mind as often as the ideas themselves and concomitant inquiry suggested, Putnam became, at length, a pragmatist. Our debt to history demands that we emphasize that Ruth Anna had been a pragmatist during the full duration of Hilary’s quest for uncertainty. If it were not simply beyond the limits of acceptable analogy, one might think of the patience of St. Monica, the latter being the true patron of Christian theology. Our story is not quite so dramatic. But there is something to be said for the way human beings learn together, read together, and grow together, intellectually, morally, and spiritually. The order of nature permits accidents, but if anything is really knowable, it is that people who share their lives will affect each other’s ideas.

I met with Hilary and Ruth Anna a number of times and came to know them in something of the way a student knows benevolent teachers. It was a great privilege to undertake a systematic study of Putnam’s full corpus and to begin to teach his writings to graduate students here in the Great Middle. Putnam became the one philosopher I was comfortable defending as the best and most faithful inheritor of the legacy of John Dewey. That is not a statement one makes lightly, when Dewey is the gold standard of philosophical practice. Even the margins have their strict standards of conservation, and indeed, they become all the more stringent as one moves out from the center. They are a centripetal counter-movement to the danger of being slung into nothingness. The pragmatists had been waiting for a deliverer but largely knew him not when he came to be among them. Most were content to let the Romans do their worst. But Putnam is a persuasive man, and he is hard to scare.

WASTING OUR TIME?

And then Putnam said: I believe that people never waste their time when they are sincerely searching for the truth. It was a question seeking justification by way of accusation in a painful time. In the kindest terms (and Putnam is not always so gentle with questioners), the audience was reminded of the sincerity of those other inquirers. Those gathered were being taught not to focus first on what was worst or merely human about their own movement or any other, but instead upon why they set aside their plows and followed a call to truth, an κκλησία, following after something worth having, if indeed it could be had. It was an answer that aimed at peace; indeed, it did more than merely aim. One looks for some word or act and straightway there is the key to the man, to the woman.

Emerson said: To be genuine. . . . The difficulty increases with the gifts of the individual. A plough-boy can be, but a minister, an orator, an ingenious thinker how hardly!⁹

Yes, it must be hard, for an ingenious thinker, but it can be done, especially if that genuineness is in one’s constitution, when one is free to follow it, when one is not tempted to believe one’s critics, and when one is undertaking a great work, such as sincerely seeking the truth or making peace.

A TIME FOR THE AGES

The Library of Living Philosophers completed seventy-five years of service to Sophia in 2013. Recent times have not been easy in the publishing industry and higher education is in the middle of massive changes. The future is always uncertain but now more than usual. We do not know what is in store, but one thing is beyond dispute: This is the last volume in our series that will bear the distinguished name of Lewis Edwin Hahn. All of us who have had a part in finishing the work he started regard him with wonder and reverence, and we dedicate our efforts to his memory and hope that they will be worthy of his legacy.

RANDALL E. AUXIER

KERRVILLE, TX

MAY 19, 2014

NOTES

1. From the journals, September 1842, in The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, ed. Bliss Perry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 183.

2. The holdings of the Morris Library in this area are found here: http://archives.lib.siu.edu/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=2089&q=putnam (accessed May 6, 2014).

3. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, 24 vols., ed. Ernst Beutler, Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, Erster Teil (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949), XVI, 346–47. Ernst Cassirer quoted this passage in two places: Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 417–18; and, in the essay The Concept of Philosophy as a Philosophical Problem, trans. Donald Phillip Verene in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935–1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 50–51. I have used Verene’s translation except in two places where the Haden translation contains lines omitted by Cassirer in the essay Verene translated. This work of Goethe’s has never been translated in full.

4. Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 92.

5. All passages from Emerson are taken from The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: William H. Wise & Co., 1929). This passage is from Courage (originally published in Society and Solitude, 1870), 697.

6. Emerson, Courage, 701.

7. This passage comes from the Christian magazine Young People’s Weekly, and the likely author is either David Caleb Cook (1875–1927) or someone who worked in his missionary organization. It was appropriated by Mary Allette Ayer for one of her motivational books of epigrams in 1908 and from there made its way onto the internet. The story of this passage and how if came to be attributed to Emerson himself is at http://irregulartimes.com/2013/03/03/the-evolution-of-a-quote-misconceived-misattributed-misconstrued/ (accessed May 17, 2014).

8. See http://www.philosophicallexicon.com/ (accessed May 7, 2014). John Heil has defended Putnam’s famous changes of position in the entry he wrote for Blackwell’s Companion to Analytic Philosophy, ed. A. P. Martinich and David Sosa (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 393–412.

9. This is from Emerson’s journals, Boston, August 18, 1832; in The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, ed. Bliss Perry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 59.

PART ONE

INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM

INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I. MY FAMILY

My father, Samuel Putnam, came from a family that arrived in the British colony of Virginia in 1647. The family may have been puritan. At any rate, my father’s parents and grandparents and great-great-grandparents were Calvinists, although, to their great disgust, my father would have much preferred it if they had been Roman Catholics. (He was not a churchgoer, however.) Here is the genealogical information on the family I have been able to find:

A PUTNAM/PUTMAN FAMILY TREE:

(According to the information on the following site:

http://www.billputman.com), including census records from Ohio and Illinois.)

[+ precedes the name of the paternal ancestor’s wife]

William Putnam + Jane Salter or Slater of Chesham, Buckinghamshire, England

begat

Thomas Putnam (1623–after 1650) + Dorothy

Came to Virginia on the Increase with their son Thomas in 1647)

who begat

Thomas Putman II (mid-1640s–about 1705?) + (?)

(name also got spelled Putnam, Puttman, and Pitman)

who begat

Zachariah Putman I (1690–1748) + ?

who begat

(Thomas, Mary and) Zachariah Putman II (around 1715–1753) + Margaret

who begat

Henry Putman (1747–1825) + Elizabeth Kendrick

who begat

(11 children, including:) Thomas Putman (1790–1827) + Nancy Grover (1792–1872)

who begat

Zachariah Putman (1824–after 1880) + Mary Ann Whitmer

who begat

(10 children, including:) my grandfather, George B. Putman (August 18, 1865–March 9, 1913)) + my grandmother, Edith Cook (Feb. 4th, 1870–Sept. 2, 1961)

who begat

Glenn, Betty, and Erle Samuel (my father) (Oct, 10, 1888–Jan. 15, 1950) (for some reason my father later always gave his birth year as 1892, but this is wrong!) + Riva Lillian Sampson (Nov. 29. 1883–Dec. 27, 1979)

who begat

ME¹

My mother, Riva Lillian Sampson, was the daughter of Michael Sampson and Toby² (I have not been able to find her maiden name). They were both born in Kovno, in what was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (then part of the Russian empire). At some point—probably in the 1880s—they emigrated to Manchester, England, where Michael worked in the sweatshops of the garment industry, as he was to do later in Chicago. I don’t know when they moved to Chicago, but my mother was born there in 1893, and she told me that some of her older siblings were born in Manchester.

Neither my father’s family nor my mother’s family could afford to send their children to college. Yet both of my parents had a thirst for education. My father made friends with the local Catholic priest (in Rossville, Illinois), who taught him Latin and Greek, whence my father’s affection for the Roman Catholic church. On the basis of what he learned from the priest, my father received a scholarship to the University of Chicago, but the scholarship didn’t pay enough to live on, which caused my father to leave the University after two years. My father was a virtuoso at foreign languages all his life; he told me that at the University he had to insert mistakes into his translations from Latin and Greek, or the professor wouldn’t believe that they were his own. After leaving the University of Chicago, my father, who had dropped the name Erle and called himself simply Samuel Putnam as soon as he left Rossville, became a newspaper reporter and then later a translator and writer.

My mother’s parents took her out of high school when she reached 16, and found her a job as a stenographer, so she could supplement the family income. (She had many brothers and sisters—I am not sure just how many.) But I know that she found a retired French teacher to teach her French, and I possess a notebook that she kept as a young woman that shows wide reading. (One thing that intrigues me is that my parents were both admirers of Tolstoy and Emerson at age 16.)

So how did a Jewish girl with Yiddish-speaking parents and a WASP reporter-translator-writer come to meet? My mother loved to tell the story till the end of her long life. My father had a first marriage of short duration, which ended in an amicable divorce. When the divorce was granted, my father threw a party for his friends, including the woman he had just divorced. My mother, who lived just below but had never been introduced to my father, went upstairs to complain about the noise. Naturally, my father invited her to join the party, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I was born on July 31, 1926, and about six months later my father, equipped with an advance from the publisher Pat Covici, and a contract to translate all the extant works of François Rabelais, took me and my mother to France. My earliest memories are of my childhood in France, and my first language was French. Originally we lived in Montparnasse, then in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb of Paris, and finally in a beautiful village called Mirmande, near Valence, from which one can see the Rhone Alps, where I went to the one-room schoolhouse for first grade. In 1933 we returned to the United States. I didn’t know a word of English when we arrived; according to my father, what I said, as a little boy from the French countryside seeing the New York skyline from the boat, was écoute mon vieux, quesque à cassée?³ After three years in different locations, my family settled in Philadelphia, where we resided until about 1947, and where I stayed on until I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. My father’s translation of Rabelais appeared in 1929, and was enthusiastically reviewed at the time.⁴

In addition, my father published two biographies, one of Rabelais, and another titled Marguerite of Navarre, First Modern Woman, and he edited a little magazine called the New Review. The story of those years is told in my father’s autobiography Paris Was Our Mistress in which I figure mainly as the baby: e.g., Ford Maddox Ford pushed my baby carriage, Pirandello came to our house in Fontenay-aux-Roses to see the baby (I am told that I sat on Pirandello’s lap), and so on.

II. COMMUNISM

According to Wikipedia (which credits a book by Peter J. King with the information⁵), "Samuel Putnam, was a journalist and translator who wrote for the Daily Worker, a publication of the American Communist Party. As a result of his father’s commitment to communism, [Hilary] Putnam had a secular upbringing, although his mother, Riva, was Jewish."⁶ This information is not wrong, but it can easily mislead. My father was a journalist in Chicago, but totally apolitical at that time. Even during my childhood in France, my father was apolitical. Only in 1936, after our return to America, did my father join the Communist Party, with which he only broke (in utter disillusionment) in 1945.⁷ Years later, when I asked him why he became a communist, his answer was unforgettable: Because I saw world-famous writers starving on the streets of New York. Also, my secular education was just as much a result of my mother’s feelings of estrangement from her father as of my father’s communism.

In any case, I was the child of communist parents from the age of ten until the age of nineteen. In fact, my first philosophy course (at age twelve!) was a course in dialectical materialism taught by my father at the Thomas Jefferson School in Philadelphia (a workers’ school run by the Communist Party); the text was Friedrich Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.⁸ At a time when my Jewish classmates were studying Hebrew and going to religious camps, I was going to meetings of something called Young Pioneers (my only memory is of a failed attempt to learn to play the trumpet—it sounded exactly like a foghorn when I blew into it), and going to a summer camp called Nature Friends, frequented by communists and fellow travelers.

Even at Central High, Philadelphia’s renowned academic high school, I remained faithful to my family’s communist beliefs until my second or third year, when I became completely disillusioned with Stalinism. (My disillusionment, at that time, was only with Stalinism, not with Marxism.) This came about as a result of books I read then, particularly Köstler’s Darkness at Noon and Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. That reading convinced me that the Moscow Trials were a complete frame-up, and that the Soviet Union, far from being the socialist utopia that my parents considered it to be, was a horrible dictatorship.

What appealed to me about communism? As a child growing up in those years, the years of the Spanish Civil War, the years of Munich, the years of the United Front in France and elsewhere, my parents’ conviction that the communist parties of the world were the only consistent opposition to fascism seemed more than plausible. But my continuing (if often wavering, or flickering almost to extinction) attraction to Marxism was not only based on the struggles against fascism of the 1930s and 1940s (as we interpreted them at that time); it was based on something less bound to current events and struggles.

In a word, what seemed right—in fact, what still seems right to me—about the arguments of communists, and, of course, anti-Stalinist socialists as well, is this: since the late nineteenth century—certainly since the early twentieth century—humankind has possessed the technical know-how and the industrial and agricultural capacity to do the following three things: (1) to make sure that no one in the world suffers from hunger and malnutrition; (2) to provide every one of the world’s families with at least minimal housing; (3) to provide every child in the world with an education. What motivates the right sort of socialist—today, that means to me, social democrats who work for gradual improvement and not revolutionaries—is the sense that to accept starvation, homelessness, and illiteracy as inevitable is to show a criminal lack of compassion.

III. A PAINFUL ARGUMENT WITH MY FATHER

My father suffered from tuberculosis, which was diagnosed when I was still in elementary school in Philadelphia. At that time, he spent two years at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. In the end, the only way to halt the spread of his disease (there were no antibiotics against tuberculosis at the time) was to surgically collapse one of his lungs. He bore all this not only without complaint, but with a sense of humor (at least in his letters to my mother and myself from the sanatorium).

In fact, both of my parents were totally uncomplaining and tremendously hard workers. To support the three of us and later to put me through college, my mother worked as a secretary and my father did four book length translations a year (with one lung!), in addition to writing a history of Brazilian literature titled Marvelous Journey: A Survey of Four Centuries of Brazilian Writing and many articles (more than 70 on Brazilian literature alone).⁹ Among his translations was a highly praised translation of Don Quixote. Yet he always found time to talk to me.

My father was the easiest person to get along with I have ever known. He was loved by his friends, of whom he had a great many, a loving parent, and a fascinating talker (all traits he inherited from his mother, my grandmother Edith, by the way). I remember only one noisy argument with him, and the contrast between his demeanor on that occasion was all the more terrifying because it was so unlike him to behave in the way he did.

The argument took place in the autumn of 1944, during my first semester at the University of Pennsylvania. After looking around at the various groups on the socialist left, I decided to join a Trotskyist group. When I told my father he went into a towering rage, and literally told me to get out of the house! As I left, he shouted that I was an objective agent of the Gestapo! I stayed for a few days with a friend’s parents, and promptly came down with the flu. My mother, who was disgusted with me for upsetting my father, but who loved me too much to see me cast into exile, came to the house where I was staying and brought me home with a high fever, and there I remained, even after I recovered from the flu, although the atmosphere was strained for the next few months.

When I was looking around for a socialist group to join, I also met my only close black friend at that time, Joseph Applegate, who, although less than a year older than I, had graduated from college and was teaching Spanish at one of the Philadelphia high schools. Unlike me, Joe decided not to join any of those groups. In fact, he found them ridiculous.

I dropped out of the University when I joined the Trotskyists (I subsequently made up for the lost year by taking extra courses the next three years), and took a job at the Philadelphia Naval Yard helping to build destroyers, and trying (unsuccessfully) to convert my fellow workers to Trotskyism. By the spring of 1945, I had decided that the Trotskyists were just as bad as the Stalinists, and I left radical politics (until the Vietnam war, many years later). By the end of the year my father too became totally disillusioned with Stalin, and regretted that (in his own words) out of misguided humility [he] had forced himself to live in the stifling atmosphere of the party line with all its ruthless intolerance for the process of the mind.¹⁰ Did my disillusionment have something to do with that? I like to think so. In any case, it became clear to him that the Party was totally controlled from Moscow, and that he had been a dupe of a tyranny for nearly ten years.

IV. MY EARLY INTERESTS

I had a juvenile interest in philosophy (not counting my father’s lectures on dialectical materialism at the Thomas Jefferson School), one awakened by reading Will Durant’s remarkable The Story of Philosophy, and I even started a small philosophy club at Central High School sometime around 1943, but I did not think of pursuing philosophy as a profession until my senior year at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Prior to that, if I thought of any profession, it was of becoming a writer like my father, or a poet—my favorite poets in high school were Housman and Swinburne, and in college, Auden, MacNeice, and Rilke—or perhaps a mathematician under the influence of Norman Tyson Hamilton, one of my two best friends in high school,¹¹ and of Bill Turanski, my best friend in college, both of whom planned to—and later did—go on to be mathematicians. When I returned to Penn in 1945 after my experiments in Trotskyism, I took various philosophy courses, but I also took courses taught by Zellig Harris in the new field of Linguistic Analysis (one of my fellow students was Noam Chomsky, although my real friendship with Noam began many years later, when he spent a year in Princeton on a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study), and courses in German. I fulfilled all the requirements for a major in each of those subjects, although my official major was philosophy. I was also active in one student group, the Philomathean Society, which proudly describes itself as the oldest continuously-existing literary society in the United States (Philo was founded in 1813).

Why was German one of my three majors (albeit unofficially)? A natural question, especially since we were still at war with Germany until May of 1945! There were several reasons. One was that Central High School decided to offer a one semester course in German in my senior year (1944)—don’t ask me why!—and curiosity led me to take that course. The following summer, I procured two copies of Goethe’s Faust, one in English and one in German, and (having an apparently congenital love of poetry) I memorized several hundred lines in German, some of which I still remember. So it seemed natural to go on