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.

希拉裏·普特南（Hilary Putuam，1926- ），當代美國著名哲學傢、邏輯學傢，新實用主義的主要代錶人物，近30年來英美哲學界最具影響力的哲學傢之一，在哲學界享有極高聲譽。其研究興趣廣泛，在心靈哲學、語言哲學、科學哲學、邏輯學等諸多領域均有重大影響，被譽為“當代惟一具有'綜觀全局'能力的哲學傢”。普特南曾任教於普林斯頓大學、麻省理工學院及哈佛大學，為哈佛大學榮譽科根學院教授。其代錶作有《理性、真理與曆史》、《詞與生活》、《重建哲學》等。