By Mike Sullivan
Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking has been named the winner of Norway's 4.5 million kroner ($700,000) Holberg Prize for his exploration of the philosophy of science, including the impact of the historical setting in which new ideas were formed. The 2009 prize will be presented November 25 at a ceremony in Oslo.
The Holberg Prize was created in 2003 by the Norwegian government in memory of Norwegian playwright and author Ludvig Holberg, who lived from 1684 to 1754. It honors work in the humanities, social sciences, law and theology. Holberg International Memorial Prize is awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology.
In 2001 the Norwegian government established the Abel Prize as an annual "Nobel Prize for Mathematics” and it was first awarded in 2003.
Ludvig Holberg, born in Bergen in 1684, held the Chairs of Metaphysics and Logic, Latin Rhetoric and History at the University of Copenhagen. He played an important part in bringing the Enlightenment to the Nordic countries.
Through his interdisciplinary and internationally oriented efforts, Holberg endeavored to modernize academic subjects and teaching methods. He also laid the foundations for international law as an academic subject in Denmark-Norway.
The first Holberg Prize was awarded to Julia Kristeva in October 2004. Since arriving in Paris in 1966 as a doctoral fellow, Bulgarian-born Kristeva has become a dominant figure in contemporary theory, as well as one of the world's most respected and rigorous intellectuals.
Developing her thought by merging various disciplines — philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, literary theory, psychoanalysis — Kristeva's research has continually sought to formulate new modes of critical discourse in order to reflect logic and reality differently. Her principal objects for analysis are modern or modernist — especially avant-garde literary texts.
The 2005 award went to the prominent German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas who has developed path-breaking theories of discourse and communicative action and thereby provided new perspectives on law and democracy.
Last year's prize went to American literary scholar Fredric R. Jameson.
The Norwegian awards committee said this year’s winner, the 73-year-old Ian Hacking, a professor at the University of Toronto and College de France, made important contributions to the philosophical understanding of such fields as physics, language, probability, psychology and psychiatry. A historian of science by vocation and a mathematician by trade, Ian Hacking studies the evolution of ideas in a wide range of fields from statistics to psychology to mathematics (above all in the theory of probability).
What the Holberg prizewinners do reminds one of the noble-spirited drive by Denis Diderot, the master brain behind the main encyclopedia of all time who once said, “Man must be the unique point of departure and the point to which all must arrive if only we want to be liked, be interesting and fascinate in our description of even the most passionless things and dry details…
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