"With the unusual clarity, distinctive and engaging style, and penetrating insight that have drawn such a wide range of readers to his work, Ian Hacking here offers his reflections on the philosophical uses of history. The focus of this volume, which collects both recent and now-classic essays, is the historical emergence of concepts and objects, through new uses of words and sentences in specific settings, and new patterns or styles of reasoning within those sentences. In its lucid and thoroughgoing look at the historical dimension of concepts, the book is at once a systematic formulation of Hacking's approach and its relation to other types of intellectual history, and a valuable contribution to philosophical understanding.
Hacking opens the volume with an extended meditation on the philosophical significance of history. The importance of Michel Foucault--for the development of this theme, and for Hacking's own work in intellectual history--emerges in the following chapters, which place Hacking's classic essays on Foucault within the wider context of general reflections on historical methodology. Against this background, Hacking then develops ideas about how language, styles of reasoning, and ""psychological"" phenomena figure in the articulation of concepts--and in the very prospect of doing philosophy as historical ontology."
By:
Ian Hacking
Imprint: Harvard Uni.Press Academi
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 17mm
Weight: 418g
ISBN: 9780674016071
ISBN 10: 0674016076
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 15 September 2004
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
"1. Historical Ontology 2. Five Parables 3. Two Kinds of ""New Historicism"" for Philosophers 4. The Archaeology of Michel Foucault 5. Michel Foucault's Immature Science 6. Making Up People 7. Self-Improvement 8. How, Why, When, and Where Did Language Go Public? 9. Night Thoughts on Philology 10. Was There Ever a Radical Mistranslation? 11. Language, Truth, and Reason 12. ""Style"" for Historians and Philosophers 13. Leibniz and Descartes: Proof and Eternal Truths 14. Wittgenstein as Philosophical Psychologist 15. Dreams in Place Works Cited Sources Index"
Ian Hacking is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. He holds the chair of Philosophy and History of Concepts at the College de France. Among his many books, the most recent is Rewriting the Soul.
Reviews for Historical Ontology
[Hacking] focuses on the interactions between what there is (or comes to be) and our concepts thereof. The kinds of objects he considers, both of which he regards as historical, are Aristotelian universals and their instances. He emphasizes that not only do ordinary physical objects and people and their institutions begin, develop, and end, but so do concepts, e.g., those language, knowledge, a child, (psychic) trauma, and scientific reasoning...Stimulating, incisive, and clear even in expounding theories of unclear writers. -- Robert Hoffman Library Journal 20020415 What, asks Ian Hacking in Historical Ontology, do I mean by live skepticism? His answer is that it is desirable to be 'genuinely in doubt and terrified that one's doubt might be warranted.' It's a healthy position for an enquirer into how new concepts and objects emerge in the province of philosophers and inventors, the novel uses of words and new ways of reasoning, and new interplays of power and knowledge. His essays demand attention and close reading. -- Maggie McDonald New Scientist 20041106
