The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make… — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in the position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position-and no end to… — Hilary Putnam Copy Share
I can only please one person per day. Today isn't your day, tomorrow doesn't look good either. — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material… — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
“Philosophy needs vision and argument… there is something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains arguments, however good, which are not inspired by some genuine vision, and something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains a vision, however inspiring, which is unsupported by arguments…Speculation about how things hang together requires… the ability to draw out conceptual distinctions and connections, and… — Hilary Putnam Copy Share
... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour). — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today… — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
...while there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to… — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy. — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
“All of this is really impossible, in the way that it is really impossible that monkeys should by chance type out a copy of… — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es! — Hilary Putnam Copy Share Image
