New Releases by Ian Hacking

Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Ian Hacking’s book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality—especially regarding the status of the natural sciences.

Twenty-five years ago one could list by name the tiny number of multiple personalities recorded in the history of Western medicine, but today hundreds of people receive treatment for dissociative disorders in every sizable town in North America. Clinicians, backed by a grassroots movement of patients and therapists, find child sexual abuse to be the primary cause of the illness, while critics accuse the "MPD" community of fostering false memories of childhood trauma. Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept of child abuse to scrutinize today''s moral and political climate, especially our power struggles about memory and our efforts to cope with psychological injuries. What is it like to suffer from multiple personality? Most diagnosed patients are women: why does gender matter? How does defining an illness affect the behavior of those who suffer from it? And, more generally, how do systems of knowledge about kinds of people interact with the people who are known about? Answering these and similar questions, Hacking explores the development of the modern multiple personality movement. He then turns to a fascinating series of historical vignettes about an earlier wave of multiples, people who were diagnosed as new ways of thinking about memory emerged, particularly in France, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Fervently occupied with the study of hypnotism, hysteria, sleepwalking, and fugue, scientists of this period aimed to take the soul away from the religious sphere. What better way to do this than to make memory a surrogate for the soul and then subject it to empirical investigation? Made possible by these nineteenth-century developments, the current outbreak of dissociative disorders is embedded in new political settings. Rewriting the Soul concludes with a powerful analysis linking historical and contemporary material in a fresh contribution to the archaeology of knowledge. As Foucault once identified a politics that centers on the body and another that classifies and organizes the human population, Hacking has now provided a masterful description of the politics of memory : the scientizing of the soul and the wounds it can receive.

Esta obra hoy en dia goza de una merecida fama como una de las mas importantes contribuciones a la filosofia de la ciencia contemporanea. Concebida como una serie de notas de clase para un curso de introduccion a la filosofia de la ciencia, consiste en una brillante y sagaz contraposicion de temas, ejemplos y contraejemplos, anecdotas y criticas que apuntalan sus dos tesis centrales: 1. la filosofia de la ciencia ha estado dominada por la teoria y ya es tiempo de abandonar ese enfoque, y 2. es posible reformular el problema del realismo de las entidades teoricas en la ciencia de tal manera que pueda resolverse mediante un criterio experimental. Representar e intervenir es uno de los primeros libros que en este siglo han defendido la utilidad de las practicas de laboratorio para las discusiones filosoficas. Hacking propone buscar la respuesta a preguntas como Que es el mundo? o Que es lo realmente existente? en los criterios con los que las tradiciones experimentales de la ciencia distinguen entre lo que esta realmente alli y lo que no. El libro, asi, resulta de interes tanto para cientificos interesados en temas filosoficos como para todos aquellos interesados en la filosofia de la ciencia.

This book combines detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breadth and verve.

Antolog a sobre las corrientes cient ficas recientes con ensayos de T. S. Kuhn, Dudley Shapere, Hilary Putnam, sir Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Ian Hacking, Larry Laudan y Paul Feyerabend, con bibliograf a y notas curriculares acerca de los participantes.

A lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism.