Massimo Dell'Utri, Putnam, Carocci 2020

The recent book 'Putnam' by Massimo Dell’Utri concerns the philosophical and argumentative journey of Hilary Putnam, that led him to explore the implications of Quine’s views about analyticity and the many ways in which realism can be understood in epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, its main entailments for the philosophy of mind, and more recently about issues concerning ethics, meta-ethics, and value-theory. The present critical review briefly recollects the reading presented in the book, and then highlights some of the implications of this reconstruction, especially those concerning a key passage in the evolution of Putnam’s thought: Putnam’s abandonment of internal realism and the endorsement of natural realism.