Ian Hacking

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Ian Hacking

CC FRSC FBA
Hacking in 2009
Born(1936-02-18)February 18, 1936
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
DiedMay 10, 2023(2023-05-10) (aged 87)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Alma materUniversity of British Columbia
Trinity College, Cambridge
Spouses
  • Laura Anne Leach
    ​
    (divorced)​
  • ​
    (divorced)​
  • Judith Baker
    ​
    (died 2014)​
Children3
Era
transcendental nominalism
)

Ian MacDougall Hacking

Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and was a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy
.

Life and career

Born in Vancouver, he earned undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia (1956) and the University of Cambridge (1958), where he was a student at Trinity College.[2] Hacking also earned his PhD at Cambridge (1962), under the direction of Casimir Lewy, a former student of G. E. Moore.[3]

Hacking started his teaching career as an instructor at

UC Santa Cruz, from 2008 to 2010. He concluded his teaching career in 2011 as a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town.[5]

Hacking was married three times: his first two marriages, to Laura Anne Leach and fellow philosopher Nancy Cartwright, ended in divorce. His third marriage, to Judith Baker, also a philosopher, lasted until her death in 2014. He had two daughters and a son, as well as one stepson.[2]

Hacking died from heart failure at a retirement home in Toronto on May 10, 2023, at the age of 87.[2][6]

Philosophical work

Influenced by debates involving

analytic philosopher. Hacking was a main proponent of a realism about science called "entity realism."[8] This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards answers to the scientific unknowns hypothesized by mature sciences (of the future), but skepticism towards current scientific theories. Hacking has also been influential in directing attention to the experimental and even engineering practices of science, and their relative autonomy from theory. Because of this, Hacking moved philosophical thinking a step further than the initial historical, but heavily theory-focused, turn of Kuhn and others.[9]

After 1990, Hacking shifted his focus somewhat from the natural sciences to the human sciences, partly under the influence of the work of

epistemological "break" involving two incompatible models of uncertainty and chance. As history, the idea of a sharp break has been criticized,[10][11] but competing 'frequentist' and 'subjective' interpretations of probability still remain today. Foucault's approach to knowledge systems and power is also reflected in Hacking's work on the historical mutability of psychiatric disorders and institutional roles for statistical reasoning in the 19th century. He labels his approach to the human sciences transcendental nominalism[12][13] (also dynamic nominalism[14] or dialectical realism),[14] a historicised form of nominalism that traces the mutual interactions over time between the phenomena of the human world and our conceptions and classifications of them.[15]

In

fugue in the late 1890s. Fugue, also known as "mad travel," is a diagnosable type of insanity in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles without knowledge of their identities.[16]

Awards and lectures

In 2002, Hacking was awarded the first

Holberg International Memorial Prize, a Norwegian award for scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology.[18]

In 2003, he gave the Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Memorial Lecture in the Humanities, and in 2010 he gave the René Descartes Lectures at the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS). Hacking also gave the Howison lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, on the topic of mathematics and its sources in human behavior ('Proof, Truth, Hands and Mind') in 2010. In 2012, Hacking was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, and in 2014 he was awarded the Balzan Prize.[19]

Selected works

Books

Hacking's works have been translated into several languages. His works include:

  • The Logic of Statistical Inference (1965)[20]
  • A Concise Introduction to Logic (1972)
    ISBN 039431008X
  • The Emergence of Probability (1975)[21]
  • Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975)[22]
  • ISBN 019875051X
  • Representing and Intervening, Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1983.[23][24]
  • The Taming of Chance (1990)[25]
  • Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995)[26][27]
  • Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (1998)[28]
  • The Social Construction of What? (1999)[29]
  • An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001)[30]
  • Historical Ontology (2002)
    ISBN 9780674016071
  • Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All? (2014)
    ISBN 9781107050174

Chapters in books

Articles

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-226-78665-0
    .
  2. ^ a b c Williams, Alex (May 28, 2023). "Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87". The New York Times. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
  3. ^ a b "Ian Hacking, Philosopher". www.ianhacking.com. Archived from the original on January 25, 2013. Retrieved June 9, 2016.
  4. ^ Jon Miller, "Review of Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology", Theoria 72(2) (2006), p. 148.
  5. ^ "Ian Hacking fonds - Discover Archives". discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  6. ^ "In memoriam: Ian Hacking (1936-2023)". Retrieved May 10, 2023.
  7. JSTOR j.ctv1n3x198
    .
  8. ^ Boaz Miller. "What is Hacking's Argument for Entity Realism?". philarchive.org. Retrieved June 27, 2023.
  9. ^ Grandy, Karen. "Ian Hacking". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on August 10, 2016. Retrieved June 10, 2016.
  10. S2CID 121660640
    . Retrieved August 20, 2022.
  11. ISBN 0-8018-6569-7
    .
  12. ^ See Transcendence (philosophy) and Nominalism.
  13. ^ A view that Hacking also ascribes to Thomas Kuhn (see D. Ginev, Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science: Scientific and Philosophical Essays in Honour of Azarya Polikarov, Springer, 2012, pp. 313–315).
  14. ^ a b Ş. Tekin (2014), "The Missing Self in Hacking's Looping Effects".
  15. ISSN 0027-8378. Archived from the original
    on March 4, 2016. Retrieved June 10, 2016.
  16. ^ "Dissociative Amnesia, DSM-IV Codes 300.12 ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition )". Psychiatryonline.com. Archived from the original on September 28, 2007. Retrieved November 28, 2011.
  17. Governor-General of Canada
    . Retrieved May 11, 2023.
  18. ^ Michael Valpy (August 26, 2009). "From autism to determinism, science to the soul". The Globe and Mail. pp. 1, 7. Retrieved April 14, 2012.
  19. ^ "Ian Hacking – Balzan Prize Epistemology/Philosophy of Mind". www.balzan.org. Retrieved June 10, 2016.
  20. ISBN 9781107144958
    .
  21. JSTOR 2738528
    .
  22. JSTOR 2183805
    .
  23. ISBN 978-0-521-28246-8
    .
  24. ISBN 978-0-521-28246-8
    .
  25. ISBN 978-0-521-38014-0
    .
  26. JSTOR j.ctt7rr17
    .
  27. ^ "Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory". psycnet.apa.org. Retrieved May 17, 2023.
  28. ISBN 978-0-8139-1823-5
    .
  29. ISBN 978-0-674-00412-2
    .
  30. ISBN 978-0-521-77501-4
    .

Further reading

External links

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