Ian Hacking

{{Infobox philosopher

| name = Ian Hacking

| honorific_suffix = {{post-nominals|country=CAN|CC|FRSC|FBA|size=100%}}

| image = Ian Hacking (cropped).jpg

| alt =

| caption = Hacking in 2009

| birth_name = Ian MacDougall Hacking

| birth_date = {{Birth date|1936|02|18|mf=yes}}

| birth_place = Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

| death_date = {{Death date and age|2023|05|10|1936|02|18|mf=yes}}

| death_place = Toronto, Ontario, Canada

| alma_mater = University of British Columbia
Trinity College, Cambridge

| spouse = {{ubl|{{marriage|Laura Anne Leach|end = divorced}}|{{marriage|Nancy Cartwright|end = divorced}}|{{marriage|Judith Baker||2014|end = died}}}}

| children = 3

| era = 20th-century philosophy

| region = Western philosophy

| school_tradition = Analytic philosophy

| doctoral_advisor = Casimir Lewy

| doctoral_students = David Papineau

| main_interests = Philosophy of science
Philosophy of statistics

| notable_ideas = Entity realism
Historical ontology (transcendental nominalism)

| influences = Michel Foucault, Paul Feyerabend, Nelson Goodman, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Casimir Lewy

| influenced = David Papineau, Jason Josephson Storm{{Cite book| publisher = University of Chicago Press| isbn = 978-0-226-78665-0| last = Storm| first = Jason Josephson| title = Metamodernism: The Future of Theory| location = Chicago | pages=119–121 | date = 2021 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=pEQ6EAAAQBAJ}}

}}

Ian MacDougall Hacking {{post-nominals|country=CAN|CC|FRSC|FBA}} (February 18, 1936 – May 10, 2023) was a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he won numerous awards, such as the 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, British Columbia, 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.{{cite news |last=Williams |first=Alex |date=May 28, 2023 |title=Ian Hacking, Eminent Philosopher of Science and Much Else, Dies at 87 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/science/ian-hacking-dead.html |url-access=limited |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230528155111/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/28/science/ian-hacking-dead.html |archive-date=May 28, 2023 |accessdate=May 28, 2023 |newspaper=The New York Times}} Hacking also earned his PhD at Cambridge (1962) under the direction of Casimir Lewy, a former student of G. E. Moore.{{Cite web|url=http://www.ianhacking.com|title=Ian Hacking, Philosopher|website=www.ianhacking.com|access-date=June 9, 2016|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://archive.today/20130125172125/http://www.ianhacking.com/|archive-date=January 25, 2013}}

Hacking started his teaching career as an instructor at Princeton University in 1960 but, after just one year, moved to the University of Virginia as an assistant professor. After working as a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge from 1962 to 1964, he taught at his alma mater, UBC, first as an assistant professor and later as an associate professor from 1964 to 1969. He became a lecturer at Cambridge, again a member of Peterhouse, in 1969 before moving to Stanford University in 1974. After teaching for several years at Stanford, he spent a year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld, Germany, from 1982 to 1983. Hacking was promoted to 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. From 2000 to 2006, he held the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France. Hacking is the first Anglophone to be elected to a permanent chair in the Collège's history.Jon Miller, "Review of Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology", Theoria 72(2) (2006), p. 148. {{doi|10.1111/j.1755-2567.2006.tb00951.x}} After retiring from the Collège de France, Hacking was a professor of philosophy 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.{{Cite web |title=Ian Hacking fonds - Discover Archives |url=https://discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ian-hacking-fonds |access-date=May 15, 2023 |website=discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca}}

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.

Hacking died from heart failure at a retirement home in Toronto on May 10, 2023, at the age of 87.{{Cite web|url=https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/news/in-memoriam-ian-hacking-1936-2023/|title=In memoriam: Ian Hacking (1936-2023)|access-date=May 10, 2023}}

Philosophical work

Influenced by debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend and others, Hacking is known for bringing a historical approach to the philosophy of science.{{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n3x198 |title=Historical Ontology |date=2002 |publisher=Harvard University Press |doi=10.2307/j.ctv1n3x198 |jstor=j.ctv1n3x198 |isbn=978-0-674-00616-4}} The fourth edition (2010) of Feyerabend's 1975 book Against Method, and the 50th anniversary edition (2012) of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions include an Introduction by Hacking. He is sometimes described as a member of the "Stanford School" in philosophy of science, a group that also includes John Dupré, Nancy Cartwright and Peter Galison. Hacking himself identified as a Cambridge analytic philosopher. Hacking was a main proponent of a realism about science called "entity realism."{{cite web|url=https://philarchive.org/archive/MILWIH |title=What is Hacking's Argument for Entity Realism?|author=Boaz Miller |website=philarchive.org|access-date=27 June 2023}} 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.{{Cite web|url=https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ian-hacking|title=Ian Hacking|last=Grandy|first=Karen|website=The Canadian Encyclopedia|access-date=June 10, 2016|archive-date=August 10, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160810074506/http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/en/article/ian-hacking/|url-status=live}}

After 1990, Hacking shifted his focus somewhat from the natural sciences to the human sciences, partly under the influence of the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault was an influence as early as 1975 when Hacking wrote Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? and The Emergence of Probability. In the latter book, Hacking proposed that the modern schism between subjective or personalistic 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. As history, the idea of a sharp break has been criticized,{{cite journal |last1=Garber |first1=Daniel |authorlink1=Daniel Garber (philosopher)|last2=Zabell |first2=Sandy |date=1979 |title=On the emergence of probability |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/41133550 |journal=Archive for History of Exact Sciences |volume=12 |issue=1 |pages=33–53 |doi= 10.1007/BF00327872|jstor=41133550 |s2cid=121660640 |access-date=August 20, 2022|url-access=subscription }}{{cite book |last=Franklin |first=James |date=2001 |title=The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1zDECQAAQBAJ |location=Baltimore |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |page=373 |isbn=0-8018-6569-7}} 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, his focus in The Taming of Chance (1990) and other writings. He labels his approach to the human sciences transcendental nominalismSee Transcendence (philosophy) and Nominalism.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). (also dynamic nominalismŞ. Tekin (2014), [http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9332/1/Tekin%2C2012%2CMIT.pdf "The Missing Self in Hacking's Looping Effects"]. or dialectical realism), 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.{{Cite news|url=http://www.thenation.com/article/root-and-branch?page=full|title=Root and Branch|newspaper=The Nation|issn=0027-8378|access-date=June 10, 2016|archive-date=March 4, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304025934/http://www.thenation.com/article/root-and-branch/?page=full|url-status=dead}}

In Mad Travelers (1998) Hacking provided a historical account of the effects of a medical condition known as 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.{{cite web |url=http://www.psychiatryonline.com/content.aspx?aID=9708 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070928075634/http://www.psychiatryonline.com/content.aspx?aID=9708 |url-status=dead |archive-date=September 28, 2007 |title=Dissociative Amnesia, DSM-IV Codes 300.12 ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition ) |publisher=Psychiatryonline.com |access-date=November 28, 2011 }}

Awards and lectures

In 2002, Hacking was awarded the first Killam Prize for the Humanities, Canada's most distinguished award for outstanding career achievements. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada (CC) in 2004.{{cite web |title=Mr. Ian Hacking |url=https://www.gg.ca/en/honours/recipients/146-15851 |website=Governor General of Canada |access-date=May 11, 2023}} Hacking was appointed visiting professor at University of California, Santa Cruz for the Winters of 2008 and 2009. On August 25, 2009, Hacking was named winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize, a Norwegian award for scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology.{{cite news |title=From autism to determinism, science to the soul |url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/from-autism-to-determinism-sciencetothesoul/article1264432/ |newspaper=The Globe and Mail |date=August 26, 2009 |pages=1, 7 |author=Michael Valpy |access-date=April 14, 2012}}

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.{{Cite web|url=http://www.balzan.org/en/prizewinners/ian-hacking|title=Ian Hacking – Balzan Prize Epistemology/Philosophy of Mind|website=www.balzan.org|access-date=June 10, 2016}}

Selected works

=Books=

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

Logic of Statistical Inference (1965){{Cite book |title=Logic of Statistical Inference – Ian Hacking |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/logic-of-statistical-inference/BD956F6BB9F16B69F2B314D3CB7DDDDA#:~:text=One%20of%20Ian%20Hacking%27s%20earliest,their%20practical%20consequences%20for%20statisticians. |publisher=Cambridge University Press| year=2016 | doi=10.1017/CBO9781316534960 | last1=Hacking | first1=Ian | last2=Romeijn | first2=Jan-Willem | isbn=9781107144958 }}
A Concise Introduction to Logic (1972) {{ISBN|039431008X}}
The Emergence of Probability (1975){{Cite journal |last=Barnouw |first=Jeffrey |date=1979 |title=Review of The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2738528 |journal=Eighteenth-Century Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |pages=438–443 |doi=10.2307/2738528 |issn=0013-2586 |jstor=2738528 |url-access=registration}}
Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975){{Cite journal |last=Loeb |first=Louis E. |date=1977 |title=Review of Why does Language Matter to Philosophy? |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183805 |journal=The Philosophical Review |volume=86 |issue=3 |pages=437–440 |doi=10.2307/2183805 |issn=0031-8108 |jstor=2183805 |url-access=subscription}}
Scientific Revolutions (1981) {{ISBN|019875051X}}
Representing and Intervening, Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1983.{{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4hIQ5fGf-_oC |title=Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science |date=October 20, 1983 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-28246-8 |language=en}}{{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/representing-and-intervening/F6506B708BB5A8B6A5D884BDCF28E7B7 |title=Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science |date=1983 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-28246-8 |location=Cambridge}}
The Taming of Chance (1990){{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/taming-of-chance/79755A47B3FE3A340C2C79FBA1DE53D0 |title=The Taming of Chance |date=1990 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-38014-0 |series=Ideas in Context |location=Cambridge}}
Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995){{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rr17 |title=Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory |date=1995 |publisher=Princeton University Press |jstor=j.ctt7rr17 |isbn=978-0-691-05908-2}}{{Cite web |title=Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. |url=https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-97589-000 |access-date=May 17, 2023 |website=psycnet.apa.org |language=en}}
Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (1998){{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |title=Mad travelers: reflections on the reality of transient mental illnesses |date=1998 |publisher=Univ. Press of Virginia |isbn=978-0-8139-1823-5 |edition=1. publ |series=Page-Barbour lectures for |location=Charlottesville, Va.}}
The Social Construction of What? (1999){{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |url=https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674004122 |title=The Social Construction of What? |date=November 15, 2000 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-00412-2 |location=Cambridge, MA}}
An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001){{Cite book |last=Hacking |first=Ian |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ycbc5cpAuMAC |title=An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic |date=July 2, 2001 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-77501-4 |language=en}}
Historical Ontology (2002) {{ISBN|9780674016071}}{{Cite journal |last=Hyder |first=David |date=2003-06-01 |title=Review of Historical Ontology |url=https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/historical-ontology/ |journal=Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews |language=en |issn=1538-1617}}
Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All? (2014) {{ISBN | 9781107050174}}

=Chapters in books=

{{citation | last = Hacking | first =Ian | contribution = The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences | editor-last = Pickering | editor-first = Andrew | editor-link = Andrew Pickering | title = Science as practice and culture | pages = 29–64 | publisher = University of Chicago Press | location = Chicago | year = 1992 | isbn = 978-0-226-66801-7 | postscript = .}}
{{Citation |last=Hacking |first=Ian |title=Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate |date=1996 |work= |pages=351–394 |editor-last=Sperber |editor-first=Dan |contribution=The Looping Effects of Human Kinds |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=9780191689093 |editor2-last=Premack |editor2-first=David |editor3-last=Premack |editor3-first=Ann James}}

=Articles=

{{cite journal|doi=10.1086/288169|title=Slightly More Realistic Personal Probability|journal=Philosophy of Science|volume=34|issue=4|pages=311–325|year=1967|last1=Hacking|first1=Ian|s2cid=14344339}}
1979: "What is Logic?", Journal of Philosophy 76(6), reprinted in A Philosophical Companion to First Order Logic (1993), edited by R.I.G. Hughes
{{cite journal|doi=10.1086/354775|title=Telepathy: Origins of Randomization in Experimental Design|journal=Isis|volume=79|issue=3|pages=427–451|year=1988|last1=Hacking|first1=Ian|s2cid=52201011}}
{{cite journal|doi=10.1215/0961754X-11-1-160|title=Truthfulness|journal=Common Knowledge|volume=11|pages=160–172|year=2005|last1=Hacking|first1=I.|s2cid=258005264 }}
{{cite journal|doi=10.1162/daed.2006.135.4.81|title=Genetics, biosocial groups & the future of identity|journal=Daedalus|volume=135|issue=4|pages=81–95|year=2006|last1=Hacking|first1=Ian|s2cid=57563796|doi-access=free}}
2007: "Root and Branch: A Canadian philosopher surveys some of the livelier flashpoints in America's battle over evolution". {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304025934/http://www.thenation.com/article/root-and-branch/?page=full |date=March 4, 2016 }}, The Nation
{{cite journal |last1=Hacking |first1=Ian |title=Putnam's Theory of Natural Kinds and Their Names is Not the Same as Kripke's |journal=Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology |date=January 1, 2007 |volume=11 |issue=1 |pages=1–24 |url=https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/principia/article/view/14845 |language=pt |issn=1808-1711}}

References

External links

[https://archive.today/20130125172125/http://www.ianhacking.com/ Official website]
[https://discoverarchives.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ian-hacking-fonds Ian Hacking archival papers] held at the [https://utarms.library.utoronto.ca/ University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services]
[https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/hacking-ian-1936/v-1 Hacking, Ian (1936–)], Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Category:1936 births

Category:2023 deaths

Category:20th-century Canadian philosophers

Category:21st-century Canadian philosophers

Category:Academic staff of the Collège de France

Category:Academic staff of the University of Toronto

Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge

Category:Analytic philosophers

Category:Canadian expatriates in England

Category:Canadian expatriates in France

Category:Canadian expatriates in the United States

Category:Companions of the Order of Canada