ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Late Ian Hacking’s Legacy for the History of Science: Reasoning, Kinds, Trees of Life

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

This roundtable reconsiders the profound and ongoing influence of Ian Hacking which has shaped research in the history of science for decades and continues to inspire scholarship spanning statistics, psychology, historical ontology, scientific classification, experimental life, and the logic and practice of inquiry. Alas, many of Hacking’s later works, as the first Anglophone elected to a permanent Chair (in “Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts”) at the Collège de France, remain less familiar to non-Francophone scholars.
The roundtable panelists include organisers Emmanuel Delille (Centre Marc Bloch, HU-Berlin) and Gordon McOuat (Inglis Professor and Founding Director, History of Science and Technology Programme, University of King’s College), both of whom have engaged deeply with Hacking’s work, along with Matthew Perkins-McVey (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology; author of Intoxicated Ways of Knowing, Chicago, forthcoming), and Matteo Vagelli, (Cà Foscari University of Venice, co-author with Hacking of Anthropologie philosophique et raison scientifique (Vrin, 2023)). Each will briefly introduce one aspect of Hacking’s late work: McOuat on Hacking’s unfinished work on natural kinds, discussed in the 2005 course Making Up People 2, Delille on Hacking’s work on trees of life in Porphyry and logic, linked to Hacking’s unpublished manuscript The Tradition of Natural Kinds, Vagelli on Hacking’s attention to philosophical anthropology as a distinctive facet of Hacking’s final intellectual project, and Perkins-McVey on Hacking’s use of historical ontology and emergent entities in biomedical research contextualised relative to his late, often overlooked, turn to the cognitive-biological foundations of experience.
Following these introductions, the floor will open for an in-depth roundtable discussion of the ways in which Hacking’s approaches continue to challenge, enrich, and also invite critique within the historiography of science and knowledge in its cultural and philosophical contexts.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Participants

• Matthew Perkins-McVey, Technion

• Matteo Vagelli, Cà Foscari University of Venice

Session Organizers

• Gordon McOuat, University of King's College/Dalhousie University

• Emmanuel Delille, Centre Marc Bloch, HU-Berlin