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REASON AND REALITY: THE RESTLESS MIND OF HILARY PUTNAM

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REASON AND REALITY: THE RESTLESS MIND OF HILARY PUTNAM

Written by: Boris Kriger
Narrated by: Lindsay Yates
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About this listen
 He invented the theory of mind that dominated the twentieth century, and then he spent a decade dismantling it. He argued that the world is one fixed thing waiting to be described, and then he argued that nobody could coherently believe such a thing. He built a logic for quantum mechanics and abandoned it. He joined a revolutionary party and later called it a mistake. Colleagues joked that if you disliked a position of Hilary Putnam's, you had only to wait.This book takes the joke seriously. Putnam was among the most inventive philosophers America has produced, a mathematician who co-authored an algorithm still running inside the software that verifies microchips, and a thinker whose questions turned out to be the questions we are now arguing about with machines. Can a mind be made of anything at all? Can words mean something to a system that has never touched the things it talks about? Is there one true description of the world, or many that cannot be reconciled? He asked all of this before anyone had a chatbot to worry about.Boris Kriger follows the restless arc of that mind from a childhood in Paris to a belated bar mitzvah at sixty-eight, from Hilbert's tenth problem to the ethics of ordinary life. Along the way he does what Putnam would have wanted rather than what a biographer usually does: he argues back, bringing recent work in complex systems and the structure of scientific claims into direct collision with some of Putnam's most confident conclusions. The result is an intellectual biography that doubles as a defense of an unfashionable virtue, the willingness to lose an argument with yourself.Written without a single equation, in plain and often mischievous English, Reason and Reality is for anyone who has wondered whether meaning lives in the head, whether a machine could think, and whether changing your mind is a failure of nerve or the whole point of having one.©2026 Boris Kriger (P)2026 Boris Kriger Philosophy Political Science Politics & Government
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