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Ian MacDougall Hacking (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.
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. 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.
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.
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, but competing 'frequentist' and 'subjective' interpretations of probability still remain today. Foucault's approach to Episteme 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), "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.
In (1998) Hacking provided a historical account of the effects of a medical condition known as Fugue state 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.
Hacking used the work of historian of science A. C. Crombie to develop his own "style" project.Hackings webpage archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20150516165039/http://ianhacking.com/thestylesproject.html
In 2012 he wrote "I have been thinking about ‘styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition’ off and on, ever since I encountered A. C. Crombie at a conference in Pisa in 1978."Hacking, I. (2012) ”Language, Truth and Reason" Thirty Years Later. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43(4): 599-609. Parts of this project appeared in his book Historical Ontology (2002).
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.
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. 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." 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.
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. 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.
Selected works
Books
Hacking's works have been translated into several languages. His works include:
Chapters in books
Articles
Further reading
External links
Categories: 1936 Births, 2023 Deaths, 20th-century Canadian Philosophers, 21st-century Canadian Philosophers, Academic Staff Of The Collège De France, Academic Staff Of The University Of Toronto, Alumni Of Trinity College, Cambridge, Analytic Philosophers, Canadian Expatriates In England, Canadian Expatriates In France, Canadian Expatriate Academics In The United States, Companions Of The Order Of Canada, Deaths From Congestive Heart Failure In Canada, Fellows Of The American Academy Of Arts And Sciences, Fellows Of The British Academy, Fellows Of The Royal Society Of Canada, Holberg Prize Laureates, Philosophers Of Language, Canadian Philosophers Of Science, Philosophy Academics At The University Of Cambridge, Recipients Of The Austrian Decoration For Science And Art, Stanford University Department Of Philosophy Faculty, University Of British Columbia Alumni, Writers From Vancouver
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