Unnamed

Ian Hacking

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  • Birth

    Birth
    Ian MacDougall Hacking was born on February 18, 1936 in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada.

  • Education

    Education
    Ian Hacking earned his undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia in 1956, and at the University of Cambridge in 1958.
    He earned his PhD at Cambridge in 1962.

  • Teaching Career

    Teaching Career
    Hacking began teaching at Princeton University in 1960, and moved to the University of Virginia one year later. He was a research fellow at Cambridge from 1962 to 1964. He became assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in 1964, then an associate professor until 1969. He worked at Stanford University in 1974, and taught for several years. He became a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1983, and University Professor in 1991. He retired from teaching in 2011.

  • Contributions to Philosophy

    He is known for applying a historical approach to the philosophy of science, considering himself a “Cambridge analytic philosopher”. He has been a proponent of entity realism. This thought encourages a realistic stance towards answering hypothesis to scientific unknowns, while skeptical of scientific theories. He is influential in bringing attention to experimental and engineering practices of science. He is considered to have brought philisophical thinking one step further than Kuhn

  • Books Authored by Ian Hacking

    Books Authored by Ian Hacking
    The Logic of Statistical Inference (1965)
    The Emergence of Probability (1975)
    Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975)
    Representing and Intervening, Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, 1983.
    The Taming of Chance (1990)
    Scientific Revolutions (1990)

  • Books Authored by Ian Hacking

    Books Authored by Ian Hacking
    Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995)
    Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (1998)
    The Social Construction of What? (1999)
    An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001)
    Historical Ontology (2002)
    Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All? (2014)

  • Awards

    · 2002: Hacking was awarded the first Killam Prize for the Humanities. (Canada) · 2004: Companion of the Order of Canada · 2009: Winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize (Norway) · 2012: Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (Austria) · 2014: Balzan Prize