Reason, Truth and History.

PUTNAM, Hilary [Richard Rorty].

$4,800.00

Item Number: 15060

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

First edition of this work by Hilary Putnam. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to fellow philosopher Richard Rorty, “For Richard to remind you of the year of the William James Lectures with gratitude for the instruction Hilary April 20, 1982.” Fine in a near fine dust jacket. A nice association linking these two giants of twentieth century philosophy.

"Hilary Putnam's Reason, Truth, and History is an interesting, ambitious well-written book, which deals with a broad set of issues (in epistemology, metaphysics, value theory, and the philosophy of language) and diverse thinkers (ranging from Plato, Berkeley and Kant to Carnap, Quine, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, and Foucault). In spite of its broad scope, the book is both relatively short and possesses a remarkable degree of unity and coherence ... the book is important because it reflects a serious effort to break the grip that the natural sciences have had on philosophical thought in this century. Although Putnam is not hostile to science, he rejects the equation of rational thinking with scientific thinking and rejects the idea that science provides the only true descriptions of reality" (International Philosophical Quarterly).