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Ian Hacking born
Ian MacDougall Hacking was born on February 18, 1936 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada -
Higher education
Ian Hacking received a BA in Mathematics and Physics at the University of British Columbia and a PhD in Moral Sciences at the University of Cambridge under Casimir Lewy in 1962. -
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Contributions to the philosophy and history of science
Ian Hacking is an analytic philosopher who was influenced by the works of Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn, among others. His broad volume of work spans philosophical aspects from the history of probability and logic to the history of mental illness. He became one of the foremost philosophers of this century, won numerous awards and gave many acceptance speeches such as the Holberg Lecture (2009): https://youtu.be/SOkuVqe3WBs -
Entity realism
He proposed the notion of entity realism in his article “Experimentation and Scientific Realism” (Philosophical Topics, vol. 13, no. 1, 1982, pp. 71–87. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43153910). Entity realism claims that the ability to interact with and use unobservable entities such as atoms to affect other phenomena justifies our belief in their existence, whereas mere theories should be viewed with skepticism. https://youtu.be/6mYfVgdtfUY -
Major works
A Concise Introduction to Logic. New York: Random House, 1972.
The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness. University of Virginia Press, 1998.
The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
