Historical Ontology
About this book
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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contents
- Chapter 1. Historical Ontology
- Chapter 2. Five Parables
- Chapter 3. Two Kinds of “New Historicism” for Philosophers
- Chapter 4. The Archaeology of Michel Foucault
- Chapter 5. Michel Foucault’s Immature Science
- Chapter 6. Making Up People
- Chapter 7. Self-Improvement
- Chapter 8. How, Why, When, and Where Did Language Go Public?
- Chapter 9. Night Thoughts on Philology
- Chapter 10. Was There Ever a Radical Mistranslation?
- Chapter 11. Language, Truth, and Reason
- Chapter 12. “Style” for Historians and Philosophers
- Chapter 13. Leibniz and Descartes: Proof and Eternal Truths
- Chapter 14. Wittgenstein as Philosophical Psychologist
- Chapter 15. Dreams in Place
- Works Cited
- Sources
- Index
