Everything about Ian Hacking totally explained
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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Ian Hacking'.
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