Hume's and much 20th-century moral philosophy contrasted moral with factual judgments and led people to conclude that the former, unlike the latter, are subjective in the sense of not being rationally supportable. Putnam...believes that the contrast is ill conceived and that the conclusion is both unwarranted and false. He acknowledges the usefulness of the fact/ value distinction but denies that anything metaphysical follows from it...Putnam covers such matters as imperative logic, economics vis-à-vis ethics, and preference theory and such thinkers as V. Walsh, L. Robbins, and R. M. Hare. A fine philosophical workout.
   --Robert Hoffman, Library Journal

Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy is a tour de force by a great philosopher. In an era of pseudo-scientific reductionism in what should be "the human sciences", Putnam's distinction as a philosopher of science and mathematics lends weight to his eloquent demolition of the dichotomy between judgments of fact and judgments of value that plays such a baneful role in economics, public policy, and the law, discouraging serious normative inquiry and argument. Anyone tempted by Milton Friedman's famous claim that concerning differences of value "men can ultimately only fight" should read this elegant and wonderful book.
   --Martha Nussbaum, The University of Chicago

This is an excellent collection on a very important issue...These are also very useful contributions, because they guide the reader, particularly the general reader, who is not an expert in either philosophy or science or economics, around the issue, so that one sees its contours, what connects with what, how it ramifies out through different disciplines. The collection as a whole thus fulfils two rather different functions: (a) bringing new and original arguments to bear against the erroneous thesis that there is a dichotomy between fact and value, and (b) guiding the reader around the contours of the issue and pointing to interesting relevant arguments developed elsewhere by others.
   --Charles Taylor, Professor of Philosophy at McGill University

Hilary Putnam is Cogan University Professor Emeritus, Harvard University.

Read More by Hilary Putnam:

• Renewing Philosophy
• Realism with a Human Face
• Words and Life
• Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Fourth Edition
• Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898
• Ethics without Ontology
• James and Royce Reconsidered: Reflections on the Centenary of <i>Pragmatism</i>