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University News
Contact: Mary Kastens - (314) 935-5285 mary_kastens@aismail.wustl.edu Philosopher Ian Hacking to lecture at Washington University's Assembly Series [St. Louis, MO., 9-16-02] Eminent philosopher Ian Hacking will deliver a lecture titled "Body Parts: Large and Small" at 11 a.m. on Wed., Sept. 25, as part of the University's Assembly Series. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Graham Chapel, located just north of Mallinckrodt Center (6445 Forsyth Blvd.) on the Washington University campus. Hacking is University Professor in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His talk will explore how new technologies -- organ transplants, the purchase and sale of body parts, sex change operations, and new definitions of death -- are radically changing the way society views our relationships with our bodies. Hacking is best known for his work in the philosophy of science, language and mathematics and his inquiry into philosophical questions about psycho-pathology. In an interview with the Toronto Star, Hacking said, "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. I sometimes describe myself, somewhat condescendingly, as a dilettante. But dilettantes are useful because they're not scared of things." The Modern Library selected The Taming of Chance, Hacking's 1990 cultural history of probability, as one of the top 100 works of non-fiction in the 20th century. Hacking's other publications include An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001), The Social Construction of What? (1999), Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (1998) and Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995). Rewriting the Soul was the winner of the 1995 Pierre Janet Writing Award of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. A reviewer from Contemporary Psychology wrote: "In Hacking's hands, multiple personality emerges as a paradigmatic case study illuminating basic questions about truth, memory, fact and fiction, about knowledge, science, and identity. . . ." In 2000, Hacking was elected to a chair in philosophy and the history of scientific concepts at the College de France in Paris. He is the first English-speaking scholar to receive this honor and joins the ranks of such distinguished intellectuals as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss and Umberto Eco. Hacking was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada. He earned a B.A. at the University of British Columbia and a second B.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cambridge University. He has taught at Cambridge and Oxford, and also at Stanford University where he chaired the philosophy department. Since 1982, he has been at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, and an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. For more information, call (314) 935-4620 or visit the Assembly Series Web page (http://wupa.wustl.edu/assembly). |
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