Ian Hacking Quotes

Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.
Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.
I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.
If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.
A 'philosophical dictionary' is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order.
All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.
Although some secrecy is odious, some is essential just to preserve our sense of self.
Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords.
Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality.
Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing.
As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers.
Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century.
Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian.
Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications.
Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past.
Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings.
Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.
Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, 'power' and 'knowledge.' As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his 'knowledge' and 'power' are to be something else.
Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed.
Great books are rare.
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AuthorName
Ian Hacking
Profession
Philosopher
BirthDate
18 February, 1936
Country
Canada
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