Introduction. Ian Hacking and the Historical Reason of the Sciences

Few contemporary philosophers, if any, have had such leading roles in such diverging institutions as the so-called Stanford School of Philosophy of Sci- ence (also home to Patrick Suppes and Nancy Cartwright, among others) and the Collège de France (Chaire de philosophie et histoire des concepts scienti- fiques, 2001-2006) – the latter recalling the Chair held by Michel Foucault in the same institution (Histoire des systèmes de pensée, 1970-1984). Few others, like Ian Hacking, have successfully undermined the Analytic/Continental di- vide, by working on the “trading zones” between these two strands, and forged their conceptual instruments by drawing these latter from different sources and applying them to widely diverse philosophical debates, across natural, so- cial and medical sciences: debates ranging from the problem of induction and proofs and deduction in mathematics to the theories of meaning and truth as well as to the controversy between realism and constructivism in natural and social sciences. It would be difficult to find a debate of the main philosophi- cal schools in the last fifty years that Hacking has not tried to assimilate or to contribute to.