伊恩·哈金

伊恩·哈金（英语：Ian MacDougall Hacking，1936年2月18日—2023年5月10日）是加拿大哲学家，加拿大皇家学会会士，英国国家学术院院士，专业领域为科学哲学科学史教授，曾获得加拿大勋章。

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.

Life and career

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, he earned undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia (1956) and the University of Cambridge (1958), where he was a student at Trinity College. Hacking also earned his PhD at Cambridge (1962) under the direction of Casimir Lewy, a former student of G. E. Moore.

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. 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.

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.