Ian Hacking Quotes

Plato was a bore.

I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.

For example, the philosophers who were interested in logic were probably rather logical for mathematicians. But the ASL got us together, so we could talk to each other and publish in the same journal.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.

There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect.

I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.

Need we add that mathematicians themselves are not infallible?

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.

The materialistic point of view in psychology can claim, at best, only the value of an heuristic hypothesis.

Mathematicians deal with intellectual concepts which they follow out for their own sake. But they stimulate scientists, philosophers, economists, poets, musicians though without being at all conscious of any need or responsibility to do so.

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

Scientists don't read theology; they don't read philosophy. It doesn't make any difference to what they're doing - for better or worse, it may not be a value judgment, but it's true.

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.

I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.

Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as a sensible intelligible world.

The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty.

For comic writers charge Socrates with making the worse appear the better reason.

The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not—what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, "Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.