Peter Putnam Selected Papers Volume 1: Foundations

Peter A. Putnam (1927 - 1987) was a gifted physicist and mathematician who was a respected student and colleague of the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler. Putnam used his exceptional model-building skills, honed at the frontiers of physics and mathematics, to develop a functional model of the human nervous system as a means to reconcile the grounding syntax of physics with the diverse syntaxes of religious, moral, aesthetic and social values. His work to unite these diverse aspects of human behavior and experience in a common causal framework was ambitious and strikingly original. From the perspective of neuroscience alone, his work anticipates later approaches by decades and offers valuable insights still relevant today. As a philosopher, the depth and breadth of Putnam's vision put him in the first rank of systematic thinkers. 

Putnam studied under John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton and associated with great 20th century physicists like Einstein, Niels Bohr and Hugh Everett. Putnam recognized that theoretical physics and theoretical mathematics were struggling with similar problems related to the grounding of their respective syntaxes. He saw a potential solution to these issues in then-current developments in neuroscience, research in perception, gestalt psychology and linguistic studies. Drawing from these and other fields, he developed a model of the nervous system as a set of self-organizing selective processes. He then proceeded over the course of 30 years to refine his nervous system model and apply it to the interpretation of psychological, sociological, political and religious phenomena. Because his originality and unique technical approach failed to resonate with more narrowly focused professionals in the fields he addressed, he chose to devote himself to teaching and writing. At his death in 1987 he left thousands of pages of typed papers on an extraordinary range of subjects - all grounded in the nervous system model he developed at the beginning of his work at Princeton.

Publisher - BookVAULT Publishing

Language - English

Perfect Bound

Contributors

By author

Tom St. Clair

Published Date - 2025-07-17

ISBN - 9781806542536

Dimensions - 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm

Page Count - 320