Product Description: A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were-and still are...read more

Product Description: Philosophy and Animal Life offers a new way of thinking about animal rights, our obligation to animals, and the nature of philosophy itself. Cora Diamond begins with "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy," in which she accuses analytical philosophy of evading, or deflecting, the responsibility of human beings toward nonhuman animals...read more

Product Description: This is a volume of specially commissioned essays of analytical philosophy, on topics of current interest in ethics and the philosophy of logic and language. Among the topics discussed are the making of wicked promises, G. E. Moore's early ethical views, as well as indexicals, tense, indeterminism, conventionalism in mathematics, and identity and necessity...read more

Product Description: Historical records show that there was no real concept of probability in Europe before the mid-seventeenth century, although the use of dice and other randomizing objects was commonplace. Ian Hacking presents a philosophical critique of early ideas about probability, induction, and statistical inference and the growth of this new family of ideas in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Some 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 sizeable 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 injury. What is it like to suffer from multiple personality? Most diagnosed patients are women: why should gender matter? How does defining an illness affect the behaviour 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 when new ways of thinking about memory emerged, particularly in France, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Made possible by these nineteenth-century developments, the current outbreak of dissociative disorders is embedded in new political settings. This study concludes with a powerful analysis linking historical and contemporary material in a fresh contribution to the archaeology of knowledge.

Product Description: Hacking tells the fascinating tale of Albert Dadas, a native of France's Bordeaux region and the first diagnosed mad traveler. Dadas suffered from a strange compulsion that led him to travel obsessively, often without identification, not knowing who he was or why he traveled...read more

Product Description: This is an introductory textbook on probability and induction written by one of the world's foremost philosophers of science. The book has been designed to offer maximal accessibility to the widest range of students (not only those majoring in philosophy) and assumes no formal training in elementary symbolic logic...read more

Product Description: This is an introductory textbook on probability and induction written by one of the world's foremost philosophers of science. The book has been designed to offer maximal accessibility to the widest range of students (not only those majoring in philosophy) and assumes no formal training in elementary symbolic logic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: En el debate sobre la construcción social hay implícita una cuestión importante: ¿qué se está construyendo en realidad? ¿Los hechos? ¿El género? ¿Una persona? ¿Un objeto? ¿Una idea? ¿Una teoría? Cada caso implica una noción diferente de construcción social, razón por la cual el presente libro se dedica a explorar un amplio abanico de ejemplos con el fin de revelar las profundas cuestiones que subyacen bajo formas enfrentadas de ver la realidad...read more

Product Description: Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Thus begins the recorded case history of Albert Dadas, a native of France's Bordeaux region and the first diagnosed mad traveller or fugueur. Dadas suffered from a strange compulsion that led him to travel compulsively, often without identification, not knowing who he was or why he travelled...read more

Product Description: Gambling on God brings together a superb collection of new and classic essays that provide the first sustained analysis of Pascal's Wager and the idea of an infinite utility as well as the first in-depth look at moral objections to the Wager.

Product Description: In this important new study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as his best selling Emergence of Probability...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Historical records show that there was no real concept of probability in Europe before the mid-seventeenth century although the use of dice and other randomizing objects was commonplace. Ian Hacking here presents a philosophical critique of early ideas about probability, induction and statistical inference and the growth of this new family of ideas in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This 1983 book is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities...read more

Product Description: This book is a philosophical study of the basic principles of statistical reasoning. Professor Hacking has sought to discover the simple principles which underlie modern work in mathematical statistics and to test them, both at a philosophical level and in terms of their practical consequences fort statisticians...read more

Product Description: Many people find themselves dissatisfied with recent linguistic philosophy, and yet know that language has always mattered deeply to philosophy and must in some sense continue to do so. Ian Hacking considers here some dozen case studies in the history of philosophy to show the different ways in which language has been important, and the consequences for the development of the subject...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: For the math lovers.