Ruth Anna Putnam

Ruth Anna Putnam (born Ruth Anna Jacobs; 20 September 1927 – 4 May 2019) was an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College.

Biography Ruth Anna Jacobs was born in Berlin on 20 September 1927.

Her father, born Karl Adolf Rudolf Hermann Jacobs in 1901 in Gotha, was Hermann Jacobs, the great great grandson of the German scholar Friedrich Jacobs. Her mother Marie Jacobs, born Marie Kohn in 1901, was the daughter of Hans Nathan Kohn, the German physician after whom the "Pores of Kohn" were named. Ruth was the couple's only child.

Ruth Jacob's parents were, respectively, Jewish and Christian by birth, but saw themselves as atheists. And she would go on to gain a Ph.D. in philosophy at UCLA in 1962 with a dissertation on "The Interpretation of Theoretical Statements" written under the supervision of Rudolf Carnap.

After three years as Acting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oregon, Ruth Anna moved to Wellesley College as a lecturer in 1963, and taught there until 1998, becoming Professor of Philosophy, and serving as chair of the Department of Philosophy in 1979–1982 and 1990–1993. Both brought up by atheist parents, they decided to bring their children up as a Jewish family. Ruth had her bat mitzvah in 1998, saying that it sent the message that "We are not going to finish Hitler's work for him. We are not going to assimilate".

In 2017 a book collecting articles on pragmatism by both Ruth Anna and Hilary Putnam was published under the title Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey. In its introduction, the volume's editor David Macarthur of the University of Sydney hailed her as "an internationally renowned interpreter of James's and Dewey's visions of pragmatism." (as editor) The Cambridge Companion to William James, Cambridge University Press, 1997, "Why Not a Feminist Theory of Justice?" in Women, Culture and Development, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford, 1995), pp. 298–331.

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