“Metaphysics without ethics is blind”: the legacy of Hilary Putnam

Two convictions underlie the following article. The first is that Hilary Putnam
has been one of the greatest thinkers of our time, a philosopher who was able to propose
groundbreaking ideas in virtually every area of philosophy. As the reader will see, the
topics he tackled in his writings included questions of philosophy of science, philosophy of
language, philosophy of mathematics and logic, philosophy of mind, metaethics, the factvalue
dichotomy, the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later thought, the question of relativism,
the analysis of rationality, the analysis of religious experience, the character of
Jewish philosophy, the interpretation of pragmatism, the elucidation of the concept of truth,
the question of realism, the relationship between mind and the world. The second is that the
changes some of his positions underwent, far from being a point of weakness—as some
critics have sometimes felt compelled to claim—reveal the freshness and genuineness of
Putnam’s way of philosophising and at the same time the essence of philosophical discussion
itself.