W hat is a hilary? In the joke dictionary The Philosophical Lexicon, words have been invented from names of philosophers. It’s very funny, though non-philosophers will just have to take this on trust. One definition is for Putnam, Hilary Putnam. A hilary is “a very brief but significant period in the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher. ‘Oh, that’s what I thought three or four hilaries ago.’” For Hilary Putnam was famous for changing his mind. While other philosophers greet every objection to their views as a personal insult, Putnam was more interested in the truth, relished criticism, and often abandoned old positions. He even changed his mind about politics and religion, veering away from communism, and turning to Judaism after a secular upbringing. (He had a bar mitzvah at the age of 68, 55 years later than is customary.)
Putnam, born in Chicago in 1926, had an unusually eclectic range of philosophical interests, from mind to language to metaphysics, all of which he approached with his characteristic nuance. “Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one,” he wrote. He is particularly famous for inventive thought experiments – one of which is about “Twin Earth”. Imagine that there is a planet just like this one but in some faraway galaxy. With a single exception, everything on Twin Earth is identical to things on Earth. On Twin Earth, somebody identical to you is reading a New Statesman article about a Twin Earth duplicate called Hilary Putnam.
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