Historical Ontology

by Ian Hacking

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.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Theory, Academic

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 14, 2002

About the author

Ian Hacking is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, specialised in the History of Science.

Wikipedia entry

Reviews

[Ed Erwin]

Someday I will find a book on contemporary philosophy that I can understand. But this isn't it.

[Alexander Weber · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of Hacking, but this collection isn't very good. A lot of these essays are about random or uninteresting topics. I thought I was going to read about biopolitics, but instead was given a LOT of writings on Language and Descartes. Which could be interesting...but too often they weren't. The one article "Making Up People" is very different and worse than the article by him, by the same name, I found online. What gives?
I love you Ian, but you shouldn't be letting people publish your books if they're poorly edited. This honestly seems like a collection of so-so essays. I was more interested in his other articles he cites throughout the book.
My favourite articles were: 1. Historical Ontology; 3. Two Kinds of New Historicism; 4. The Archaeology of Michel Foucault; 5. Michel Foucault's Immature Science; 6. Making Up People; 10. A Radical Mistranslation?; 11. Language, Truth, and Reason; 12. Style for Historians and Philosphers
So I guess 8/15 ain't bad...but could have been better.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice collection.
But I'm just happy that this hideous cover made at least some sense by the end.

[Bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a difficult read, with the author rapidly moving from one thought to the next, and constantly referring to other texts with the assumption that the reader is familiar with them. However, it does contain some quite fascinating and thought-provoking ideas throughout. I found his discussion of how new ways to classify open up or close down possibilities for human action to be particularly interesting. I was also intrigued by his discussion of how “the very candidates for truth or falsehood have no existence independent of the styles of reasoning that settle what is to be true or false in their domain.” He also discusses such topics as language, translation, truth, reason, science, proof, eternal truths, psychology, and dreams. I found that the best way to read the text was to use text-to-speech, as it makes it easier to grasp the overarching ideas without getting bogged down with the complexities of each word and sentence.

[Brig · Rating 2 out of 5]

whatever. dude is super analytic and i think it's insane to write a book on HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY and barely cite heidegger. hate the way he wrote, hated what he had to say about kant, HATE how he's using foucault.

[June · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these felt really meaningful and perfectly onto something, others felt like book reports of Foucault.

[T · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 1/2 stars. This collection of essays deals mostly in history and how various concepts "come into being" or emerge through a variety of historical processes. There's a huge Foucauldian influence at play, and Hacking possesses a much greater enthusiasm for Foucault than I could frankly ever muster. The essays themselves are hit or miss. Most of them are what Hacking calls "philosophy as conversation" rather than "philosophy as problem-solving." That's a fine enough endeavor for what it is, but, as a result, many of the pieces come as describing, rather than doing, philosophy. There's also a kind of pervasive straining present in some of the pieces, in which Hacking has taken a dull and insignificant topic and attempted to circumscribe significance to it. He typically fails, and so the pieces remain boring and insignificant.

I did like his talk about different styles of reasoning and their relation to the scientific enterprise. He paints a very, very general outlook or overview of what an approach to styles of reason might entail, but he doesn't go any further than that. The brevity of the essay was disappointing, however, because his thoughts there were really his most stimulating ideas in the book. There's another fascinating concept he terms "making up people," which refers to the idea that certain ways for people to be, in a quite literal sense, emerge as contextualized in history through a variety social practices. Although, I do feel as if the idea may be taken too far, and I wonder if there aren't alternative explanations for certain made up people "suddenly" coming into existence.

[Lilly Irani · Rating 4 out of 5]

A philosopher reading Foucault to reconsider the relationship between language and reality. It is a collection of essays that will be interesting (and I think right on) reconsiderations of Foucault for those used to reading critical theory and anthropology but may just read as abstract to people encountering Foucault or philosophy for the first time. I wish there were more detailed histories and accounts of practices showing just how the "making of people" (certain kinds of people) Hacking argues for happens. I think his other books give those grounded details and this is more of a interlinking between analytic philosophy and Foucault.

[Sean Cohmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fantastic collection of essays by Ian Hacking. I like his "Making Up People" but I also appreciate his ability to put Foucault into plain language in a way that doesn't make me want to lock myself into a mad-house just out of spite. I'm a historian of science and medicine interested in the role that abstract category-making plays in shaping the scientific research that gets done. If this kind of thing sounds interesting to you, Hacking makes a good read.

[Rafael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may be an uneven collection of essays, but it has some original and fruitful ideas. Essays 11 and 12 are probably the best introductions to Hacking's concept of "styles of scientific reasoning", which is certainly an important analytical tool in recent philosophy of science. On the other hand, essay 6 is a formulation of his idea of "making up people", which he has developed with more detail in his courses in College de France.

[Tudor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find the idea of historical ontology very interesting, and I am using the chapter "making up People" in my research. It describes how medical language makes up people. I heard him speak and I found his argument very convincing. He his a neo-Foucault, who (I believe) holds the chair that Foucault held ad the College du Paris.

[Menocchio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I translated it into Italian!