Ian Hacking, CC (born 1936 in Vancouver) is a philosopher operating in the fields of philosophy of science and philosophy of language. He has undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia and the University of Cambridge, where he was a student at Trinity College, and where he also took his Ph.D. After teaching for several years at Stanford University he joined the University of Toronto in 1982, and was made a University Professor there in 1991, and now resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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 Dupre, Nancy Cartwright, and Peter Galison.

In 2001 he was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy and of the History of Scientific Concepts at the prestigious Collège de France, France's highest academic honour, at the time this made Hacking the only anglophone to have ever been appointed to a chair at the Collège, although in France he lectures in French, in which he recently made himself conversant, and therefore not a wholly idiosyncratic appointee. 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.

Selected works

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Hacking's works have been translated into several languages.

• The Logic of Statistical Inference (1965)
• The Emergence of Probability (1975)
• Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975)
• Representing and Intervening (1983)
• The Taming of Chance (1990)
• Scientific Revolutions (1990)
• Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995)
• Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (1998)
• The Social Construction of What? (1999)
• Probability and Inductive Logic (2001)
• Historical Ontology (2002)

1936 births | Living people | 20th century philosophers | 21st century philosophers | Canadian philosophers | Companions of the Order of Canada | Philosophers of science | Stanford University faculty | Vancouverites

Ian Hacking | Ian Hacking | Ian Hacking | Ian Hacking