Renewing Philosophy

A renewal of philosophy is precisely the point of this book, in which one of America's most distinguished philosophers, surveying an astonishingly wide range of major issues, proposes a new, clear-cut approach - an "attitude" - to philosophical questions. Hilary Putnam contests the view that only science offers an appropriate model for philosophical inquiry, that only a metaphysics congruent with physics suffices, while questions of art and ethics, love, death and religion must be set aside due to the lack of an adequate language or perspective. His discussion of topics from artificial intelligence to natural selection, and of reductive philosophical views derived from these models, identifies the insuperable problems encountered by philosophy when it ignores the normative or attempts to reduce it to something else. Looking for a better way of doing philosophy, Putnam takes up the problems posed by religious discourse, often viewed by philosophers as prescientific and primitive, an unlikely survivor from the age of superstition. In pages on Wittgenstein, he refutes this view and shows how the philosopher's frequently misunderstood forays into religious discourse actually open up philosophy to a broad range of practical, moral, and political issues. In closing, Putnam considers Dewey, who occupies a middle ground between metaphysics and skepticism, and whose broadly epistemiological arguments in favour of democracy this book advances.