3Putnam’s work was inspired by a broad range of fields, ranging from the history of philosophy (especially analytic philosophy and pragmatism) and the philosophy of science and mathematics to philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethics. The fecundity of his inquiry – with its rare combination of eclectic approaches, conceptual and methodological rigor, and a willingness to resolve problems in an open-minded way − continues to inspire fresh forays into broad fields of great importance for philosophy, where science, philosophy, and culture continuously interact. This international interest in Putnam’s work testifies to his originality and demonstrates the ongoing importance of his groundbreaking thought. His subversive ideas and experiments engender fruitful discussions that stimulate mutual understanding. Through novel intuitions and an acute and rigorous analysis, he offers us, at the meeting-point of analytic philosophy and pragmatism, myriad ideas and insights that aim at a philosophy of life.

4Putnam’s distinctive voice in contemporary philosophy has inspired a new generation of philosophers – especially philosophers of science, mind, and language – and scholars of American philosophy. Together with Rorty, he also contributed to the rise in international interest in pragmatism. This is significant: thanks to his diverse philosophical interests and to his charisma, Putnam became an ardent spokesperson for a scientific humanism that integrates science with human values. His scientific humanism – informed by pragmatism – combines values, inquiry, and science. Indeed, he did not see human values and science as in conflict but as “entangled.” Not only do they coexist, but both are essential for human flourishing. Putnam would surely agree with the words of Goethe’s Mephistopheles: “If reason and knowledge you will despise, the highest force to which man can rise, I’ll have you for sure” (Jasper 1957: 158). He defended science but deplored the “scientism” of many analytic philosophers, namely the imperialist tendencies of the scientific method that treat the human being as an object of investigation for the natural sciences. In Putnam’s view, analytic philosophy was dominated by the idea that “science and only science describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective” (Putnam 1992: x). He rejected the belief that the scientific method is the only allowable method of human investigation and the concurrent assumption that all the other discourses must be modeled upon it. He feared that scientism and self-objectivation transform the human being into an object or a thing.

5Putnam is known among scholars for changing his mind several times during the course of his long career. This label is not a stigma, however, because his famed readiness to change his mind and to reexamine his own position was a sign not of intellectual incoherence but of intellectual integrity, of thought in constant evolution, and of continued reflection on alternative points of view and new perspectives. Far from being a systematic exposition of a body of doctrine, Putnam’s work is the expression of a dialectical mind. He himself made no secret of this attitude: “if constantly rethinking one’s philosophical arguments and commitments is ‘changing one’s mind,’ then I hope I never stop ‘changing my mind’” (Putnam 2015: 96). His changes of mind are efforts at self-criticism and self-improvement. They are “evidence of a powerfully imaginative philosophical intelligence that is […] concerned to manifest the virtues of curiosity, imagination, and honesty” (De Caro & Macarthur 2012: 2). In the wake of Dewey’s fallible humanistic experimentalism, Putnam understood that “philosophical tasks are never really ‘completed’”: inquiry is instead characterized by a continuous, recursive, and flexible but systematic model of trial, error, and subsequent correction to gain new insights. After all, “there are no last words in philosophy” (Putnam 2012: 298, 353).

6Until the 1980s, Putnam was influenced by the work of Carnap, Reichenbach, Quine, and of course Wittgenstein. From these philosophers, he not only learned the method, conceptual tools, and argumentative techniques of analytic philosophy, but he also developed his early interest in the scientific method, scientific epistemology, and the philosophy of physics.

7Most of the essays Putnam wrote between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, collected in his three volumes of Philosophical Papers (1975a, 1975b, 1983), were influenced by his analytic teachers. These papers address a variety of philosophical problems that stem from the most central issues of philosophy of science, including the concept of mathematical truth, the indispensability of the mathematics thesis (specifically how it is justified by the role it plays in empirical sciences, particularly in physics), the foundations of quantum mechanics, the space time theme, and functionalism (that is, the idea that human mental states are computational states or processes of the brain that are functionally characterized by the relations between inputs [stimuli] and outputs [responses]). According to Putnam, the mind is as a computational machine. This idea, which he went on to reject in the 1980s, influenced most recent developments in cognitive science. In addition to these issues, Putnam addressed the no-miracles argument, that is, the idea that scientific realism is the only philosophy of science that “does not make the success of science a miracle,” the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, and the causal theory of reference, explained by the famous “Twin Earth” thought experiment, which explored the connection between words and meaning. He also rejected as implausible the interpretation of verificationism and the analytic/synthetic dichotomy.

8Subsequently, he decisively distanced himself from and critiqued certain principles of analytic philosophy: notably, reductionism, the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, the epistemological status of mathematics, and the idea of a unified science. Putnam’s philosophy was not subject to a widespread dilemmatic dualism, according to which moving away from an orientation of thought (e.g., analytic philosophy) requires that one be utterly hostile to it. Indeed, he fiercely resisted such dualism. Declaring oneself to be contrary to or disinterested in a certain tradition might be understood as equivalent to the illusory discovery of an Archimedean point from which one may overturn or disavow their past theorizing, and this is far from Putnam’s approach. On the contrary, if we follow Putnam, one can move away from a cultural praxis just by virtue of what one has absorbed from it.

9The central question of realism, namely the conception of how language hooks onto the world, was one that Putnam returned to throughout his life. In his “long journey from realism back to realism” (Putnam 1999: 49), he adhered to various forms of it – from scientific realism to metaphysical realism to internal realism to commonsense or “pragmatic” realism, and finally to scientific realism that reconciles commonsense realism and scientific naturalism – but he always tried to avoid both the drift of scientism and the pitfalls of relativism and skepticism.

10From the early 1980s onwards, Putnam’s thought took a pragmatist turn, although he did not call himself a pragmatist and never ceased to revisit and revise the issue of realism or to be interested in the philosophy of mathematics and physics. In the work of classical American pragmatists (such as Peirce and especially James and Dewey), Putnam discovered new ideas and insights: fallibilism; antiskepticism; antifoundationalism; antirepresentationalism; the supremacy of the agent’s point of view; the idea that truth and the justification of ideas are closely connected; the untenability of the fact/convention and fact/value dichotomies. He wished to bring all of the ideas and insights associated with American pragmatism to the attention of the philosophical community. Putnam did not want to revise pragmatism as a “movement” from which to derive systematic theories. In his view, “turning to American pragmatism does not mean turning to a metaphysical theory” (Putnam 1994: 152). So long as we believe that pragmatists have theories, we will inevitably misunderstand them.