I found out yesterday that the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking has passed away. The University of Toronto philosophy department has a notice here, and Brian Leiter's philosophy blog has some great reminiscences here. What follows are my own reflections on his passing.
It is difficult for me to overstate how important Ian Hacking was to me as a thinker.
Throughout my life, I have had a tendency to form what we now commonly refer to as "parasocial relationships". I'd find someone to admire and I'd read everything about them and then eventually I'd move on.
So it was in the early 2000s that I embarked on a (in hindsight ill-conceived) plan to get an MA in philosophy from the University of Toronto. The reason for this was pretty straightforward - at the time I was being passed over for jobs in the Ontario Government (where I worked) for people who had MAs in...just about anything. It was that simple!
At that point getting a graduate degree in music was out of the question (Why? Good question!) but in any case, like most clever young men, I thought I would really like to pursue a philosophy degree.
However, there was a catch - as someone with a music degree, I needed at least 10 half courses in philosophy to apply for the the MA program. I should add, and this will be important for later, U of T had very restricted enrollment for the MA due to the fact that the department, like most departments, saw its graduate program as a training program, and no one gets a job with an MA in philosophy - no one, except I hoped, for myself!
Anyway, I started accumulating credits, and at some point (the specific moment is lost to time) I found out about Ian Hacking. It might have been at a philosophy social, where I met him and had a nice brief conversation with him about his Wittgenstein course (which I couldn't take due to a scheduling conflict - I was taking these courses while holding down a full time job).
At some point, I started reading his work and was blown away by it. Although the analytic/continental philosophy wars seem to have died off, at the time (2002-2006?) they were very much alive. Ian Hacking somehow managed to straddle this distinction - he had come out of the analytical side, discovered Foucault, and then did philosophical genealogies à la Foucault, but which were in fact, much better than anything Foucault had produced.
Beyond this, he was perhaps the clearest philosophical writer I had ever read - he could take virtually any concept, from either side of the-then philosophical divide, and make it easy to understand for those of us who perhaps didn't have the time to invest in just reading the texts.
I read everything he wrote - books, papers, essays, even his reviews in the NY Review of Books. I wasn't ever able to take a course with him, again mostly due to scheduling conflicts, but so much of my philosophical underpinnings come from that reading - far more than any of the coursework I did.
In fact, calling my relationship to him "parasocial" doesn't really do justice to his influence on my thinking - it's more akin to ancient understanding of philosophical schools (Pierre Hadot's What is Ancient Philosophy? is a great introduction to this topic), where the practice of reading and discussing a philosopher's work transforms one's own perceptions of the world.
That's the kind of effect he had on me. I never got into the MA program (and wound up doing something very different indeed!) but I regularly think about Ian Hacking, his sense of wonder, and how he did philosophy, and it makes me want to look at the world anew after so many years of closing myself off to it.
I wish there were more people out there like him, and even if he never founded a philosophical school on the Athenian model, I'd like to think that his legacy might prod some of us (me, just me), to, in a clumsy paraphrase of one of his books, try to do a little less representing, and a little more intervening.
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