Ian Hacking

Ian Hacking
Hacking at the 32nd International Wittgenstein Symposium in 2009
Born	(1936-02-18) February 18, 1936 (age 80) Vancouver, British Columbia
Alma mater	University of British Columbia Trinity College, Cambridge
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of science Philosophy of statistics
Influences Michel Foucault, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Casimir Lewy
Influenced David Papineau

Ian MacDougall Hacking, born February 18, 1936, is a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he has won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and been a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 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, Cambridge. Hacking also earned his PhD at Cambridge (1962), under the direction of Casimir Lewy, a former student of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

He 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 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 in 1969 before shifting 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 and currently spends his days tending to his inner-city garden in Toronto with his wife, Judith Baker.