Hilary Putnam

Hillary Putnam is a key figure in the philosophy of mind during the 20th century. After receiving his BA at Penn (where he was an undergraduate with Noam Chomsky) and PhD at UCLA (under Hans Reichenbach), he taught at Princeton, MIT, and Harvard, where he is now Cogan University Professor emeritus.

Putnam was an early and influential advocate of functionalism (roughly, the view that the human mind is analogous to a digital computer) but in "Representation and Reality" he recanted his earlier views and set out to explain why functionalism, in his revised view, would not work. He is well known for his doctrine that "meaning is not in the head", which is most famously illustrated by his Twin Earth thought experiment.

Putnam also contributed to the resolution of Hilbert's tenth problem in mathematics.