P.M.S. Hacker
| Peter Hacker | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker 15 July 1939 (age 78) London |
| Alma mater | The Queen's College, Oxford |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
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Main interests
|
Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mind, Neurophilosophy, Wittgenstein |
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Notable ideas
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The mereological fallacy in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind |
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Influences
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Peter Michael Stephan Hacker (born 15 July 1939) is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is known for his detailed exegesis of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his outspoken conceptual critique of cognitive neuroscience.
Peter Hacker studied philosophy, politics and economics at The Queen's College, Oxford from 1960–63. In 1963–65 he was senior Scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he began graduate work under the supervision of Professor H. L. A. Hart. His D.Phil thesis "Rules and Duties" was completed in 1966 during a Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford.
Since 1966 Peter Hacker has been a fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford University philosophy faculty. His visiting positions at other universities include Makerere College, Uganda (1968); Swarthmore College, USA (1973 and 1986); University of Michigan, USA (1974); Milton C. Scott visiting professor at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada (1985); Visiting Fellow in Humanities at University of Bologna, Italy (2009). From 1985 to 1987 he was a British Academy Research Reader in the Humanities. In 1991–94 he was a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. Peter Hacker retired from Oxford in 2006, but he has been appointed an Emeritus Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford and is presently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent.
Peter Hacker is one of the most powerful contemporary exponents of the linguistic-therapeutic approach to philosophy pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this approach, the words and concepts used by the language community are taken as given, and the role of philosophy is to resolve or dissolve philosophical problems by giving an overview of the uses of these words and the structural relationships between these concepts. Philosophical inquiry is therefore very different from scientific inquiry, and Hacker maintains accordingly that there is a sharp dividing line between the two: "Philosophy is not a contribution to human knowledge, but to human understanding" (quoted from "An Orrery of Intentionality"). This has led him into direct disagreement with "neuro-philosophers": neuroscientists or philosophers such as Antonio Damasio and Daniel Dennett who think that neuroscience can shed light on philosophical questions such as the nature of consciousness or the mind-body problem. Hacker maintains that these, like all philosophical problems, are not real problems at all, but mirages arising from conceptual confusion. It follows that scientific inquiry (learning more facts about humans or the world) does not help to resolve them. His 2003 book "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience", co-authored with neuroscientist Max Bennett, contains an exposition of these views, and critiques of the ideas of many contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers, including Francis Crick, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and others.
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