Abstract

In this interview, Ian Hacking explains why philosophy should essentially be concerned with science and scientific problems. By retracing his education and career, together with the genesis of his major works, he draws out the trajectory that lead his far-reaching philosophy of «scientific styles» from his works on probability, through the «new scientific realism» fostered by his philosophy of the experiment, to his philosophy of mathematics. In the foreground is the overall influence of Foucault, in particular on Hacking's «making up people» project, and in general on his idea that we should be writing the «history of our present».