Ian Hacking has died

Archived: https://archive.ph/2023.05.28-161235/https://www.nytimes.com...

Rest in peace. He taught at my university (University of Toronto), and he was obviously a rock star in the philosophy department. Still, as an undergrad, I was too concerned with drinking and passing my classes to really give his work serious intellectual consideration.

Moving into a new home the summer I graduated, I found a pile of books left on the curb. One of them was Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science. I ended up tearing through it, utterly fascinated by the ideas and the philosophical landscape -- an agenda of discussion -- that he laid out so clearly, like a dictionary. I used to be quite naive when it came to science -- I thought philosophical topics around it were not worth thinking about. But he slapped the naivete out of me and single-handedly deepened my curiosity in science as an enterprise, as a social worldview, and as a variety of competing epistemic outlooks with profound implications.

Reading this article, I'm glad that he received the accolades and attention that he had. So much to think about, and what an incredible amount of thinking he did in his life.

It’s been a long time since I read it, but Social Construction of What? was a great book, philosophy at its best, in my opinion: lending clarity and rigor to concepts that reach into law, psychology, medicine, ethics, and the every day.

“Ian Hacking was a one-person interdisciplinary department all by himself” — true that. One of the greats.

Still remember randomly coming across his book "Representing and Intervening" when I first got interested in philosophy of science. Pleasantly readable and illuminating. Great companion piece to other works by Cartwright or van Fraassen.

I recently read the book Against The Gods (1996) on the development of mathematical probability theory in the early modern period, but I wasn't aware that the history in that book seems to have been covered also by Hacking in The Emergence of Probability (1975) and The Taming of Chance(1990). For anyone who has read these books, I'm curious how they relate.

The Emergence of Probability is a masterpiece, far greater than its purview on the history of statistics.

Thanks for all the great writings!

Hacking was great. RIP