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Ian Hacking, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002, 279 pp.
Ian Hacking is my candidate for The Great Canadian Philosopher of the twentieth century. To be sure, Marshall McLuhan has wider international renown, and Charles Taylor has impressively philosophized for Canada. However, Hacking is unique as a synthesist of the best of recent Anglo-American and French thought, which is probably the most natural role for a Canadian to occupy in the global intellectual conversation.
The book under review is mostly a set of book reviews, occasional pieces and lectures delivered over the past quarter-century, prefaced by an essay bearing the book's title.
The sequence of Hacking's institutional affiliations quickly marks the intellectual trajectory traversed in the book. From Vancouver, Hacking landed at Cambridge, where he excelled as an interpreter of probability theory and statistical inference. There he was swept up in the last wave of Wittgenstein's influence, namely, Michael Dummett's piecemeal approach to philosophical problems. He then imported this orientation to Stanford, where he became the father figure of the so-called turn to "disunity" in science studies, which stresses the context-specificity of existence claims in the sciences. Hacking's interest in the distillation of particular facts...