
Hilary Putnam’s most surprising philosophical shift began at home - Petiver
http://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Marriage-of-Minds/241103
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CurtMonash
When I went to Harvard as a math graduate student in 1976, the professors I
was most looking forward to engaging with in some way weren't mathematicians.
One was Ken Arrow, in large part because of his Impossibility Theorem, which I
later extended in various (unpublished) ways. The other was Putnam, in large
part because of his paper The Mental Life of Some Machines, which for me was
quite effectively blew up mind/body duality.

I sat in on an undergraduate course by Putnam. It wasn't all that exciting,
but a few memorable moments were:

\-- His confession/apology about having greatly changed his mind in recent
years on political matters. (Apparently he'd been a leading left-winger in the
then-recent Vietnam War protest era.)

\-- A crack that "If it weren't for the parallelogram law of forces, physics
would be like sociology."

\-- A crack that Unitarianism was the belief that there exists no more than
one god.

\-- His description of his standard final examination: "Part A: Write a
question suitable for this course. Part B: Answer it. You will be graded on
both parts."

~~~
grzm
> _" Part A: Write a question suitable for this course. Part B: Answer it. You
> will be graded on both parts."_

This is brilliant. Thank you for sharing it!

~~~
CurtMonash
Most welcome!

And by the way:

\-- He told the story of a student giving the obvious answer.

\-- For some reason he did NOT point out that that answer would actually only
work as an infinite recursion.

------
CurtMonash
Today's NYT article on "feminist philosophy" could actually be quite relevant.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/opinion/feminist-
philosop...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/opinion/feminist-philosophy-
future.html)

~~~
kennethh
If you want to understand feminism viewed in perspective I suggest one read
Rational Male: [https://therationalmale.com/category/the-feminine-
imperative...](https://therationalmale.com/category/the-feminine-imperative/)

A snippet from his article:

In several essays, and in my latest book, I describe women’s natural social
order as the Sisterhood Über Alles. That is ‘women above all else’, and from
an evolved psychological perspective this solidarity, collectivism and
cooperative bent is the mental vestige of an evolution that demanded women to
be so in order to survive. Evolution doesn’t care how women breed and survive,
just that women breed and survive. Flash forward to modern times and we see
women of every and any social, political, religious and racial stripe preempt
any conviction inspired by them with the concerns of womankind.

~~~
CurtMonash
Could that be summarized as "Women and children first"? :)

