Ian Hacking, CC, Ph.D., FRSC, FBA (born February 18, 1936 in Vancouver) is a Canadian university professor and philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of science.

He has undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia (1956) and the University of Cambridge (1958), where he was a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Hacking also took his Ph.D. at Cambridge (1962), under the direction of Casimir Lewy, a former student of Wittgenstein's.

He taught at UBC as an Assistant Professor, then an Associate Professor, spending some time teaching at the Makerere University College in Uganda. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1969 before shifting to Stanford in 1974 . After teaching for several years at Stanford University, he taught for a brief time in Germany (1982-1983). He became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1983 and University Professor (the highest honour the University of Toronto bestows on faculty) in 1991, while also lecturing at Princeton and Cambridge on and off. From 2000 to 2006, he was the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France.

Hacking is known for bringing a historical approach to the philosophy of science and was one of the important members of the "Stanford School" in philosophy of science, a group that also included John Dupré, Nancy Cartwright, and Peter Galison. Despite his strong interest in historical revolutions in science (following the work of Thomas Kuhn), Hacking defends a realism about science, "entity realism", albeit only on pragmatic grounds: the electron is real because human beings use it to make things happen. This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards the entities postulated by mature sciences but skepticism towards scientific laws. In his later work (from 1990 onward), his focus has shifted from the physical sciences to psychology, partly under the influence of the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault was an influence as early as The Emergence of Probability (1975), in which Hacking proposed that the modern schism between subjective or personalist probability, and the long-run frequency interpretation, emerged in the early modern era as an epistemological "break" involving two incompatible models of uncertainty and chance. Foucault's approach to knowledge systems and power is also reflected in Hacking's work on the social construction of psychiatric disorders and institutional roles for statistical reasoning in the 19th century.

In 2002, he was awarded the first Killam Prize for the Humanities, Canada's most distinguished award for outstanding career achievements. In 2004, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. Hacking was last appointed visiting professor at University of California, Santa Cruz for Winter 2008.

Selected works

Hacking's works have been translated into several languages.

• The Logic of Statistical Inference (1965)
• The Emergence of Probability (1975)
• Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975)
• Representing and Intervening (1983)
• The Taming of Chance (1990)
• Scientific Revolutions (1990)
• Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995)
• Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (1998)
• The Social Construction of What? (1999)
• An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001)
• Historical Ontology (2002)

External links

• University of Toronto profile
• Collège de France profile
• Hacking, Ian in The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Ideas radio show, discusses Hacking's views of science and its place in society
• China on My Mind: Ian Hacking on the 1989 Demonstrations

Writings

• Hacking's contributions to the The New York Review of Books
• Hacking's contributions to the London Review of Books
• Root and Branch, in The Nation, October 8, 2007
• "The Complacent Disciplinarian", presented in Rethinking Interdisciplinarity.
• "''Les Mots et les choses'', forty years on", lecture delivered at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, in October 6, 2005, about Michel Foucault's The Order of Things
• "Genetics, biosocial groups & the future of identity", Daedalus, Fall 2006, Vol. 135, No. 4: 81?95
• "Truthfulness", Common Knowledge, Vol. 11, No. 1. (2005), pp. 160-172.

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