Hilary Putnam

1926–2016 · American philosopher and mathematician

Topics: mathematics, philosophy

• The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.

  — Hilary Putnam

• No sane person should believe that something is 'subjective' merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

  — Hilary Putnam