Words and life

Abstract

Hilary Putnam has been convinced for some time that the present situation in philosophy calls for revitalization and renewal; in this book he shows us what shape he would like that renewal to take. Words and Life offers an account of the sources of several of the central problems of philosophy, past and present, and of why some of those problems are not going to go away. As the first four part titles in the volume suggest - Return of Aristotle, Legacy of Logical Positivism, Inheritance of Pragmatism and Essays after Wittgenstein - many of the essays are concerned with tracing the recent, and the not so recent, history of these problems. The goal is to bring out what is coercive and arbitrary about some of our present ways of posing the problems and what is of continuous interest in certain past approaches to them. Various supposedly timeless philosophical problems appear, on closer inspection, to change with altered historical circumstances; while there turns out to be much of permanent value in Aristotle's, Peirce's, Dewey's and Reichenbach's work on some of the problems that continue to exercise us. A unifying theme of the volume as a whole is that reductionism, scientism and old-style disenchanted naturalism tend to be obstacles to philosophical progress. As the titles of the final three parts of the volume indicate - Truth and Reference, Mind and Language and Diversity of the Sciences - the sweep of the problems considered here comprehends all the fundamental areas of contemporary analytic philosophy.

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