P. M. S. Hacker is Emeritus Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, where he was a Tutorial Fellow in philosophy from 1966 to 2006. He was an undergraduate at the Queen’s College (1960-63), a graduate student at St Antony’s College (1963-5), and a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College (1965-6). He has held visiting chairs in North America, and both British Academy and Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships. He was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at The Queen’s College in 2010.
He was a part-time Senior Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury 2013-16, and was appointed to an Honorary Professorship of University College, London at the UCL Institute of Neurology in 2020. He is the author of 27 books and over 175 papers. He is a leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein and has written a seven-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations as well as Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy (Blackwell, 1996).
Together with the renowned Australian neuroscientist Maxwell Bennett, he has written four major works on philosophy and neuroscience criticising the conceptual confusions of cognitive neuroscientists. In 2021, he completed a tetralogy on human nature (Human Nature: the Categorial Framework (2007): The Intellectual Powers (2013); The Passions (2018); and The Moral Powers (2021)). Together with Joachim Schulte, he has produced a new edition and extensively modified translation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (2009); recently he has completed a new edition and translation of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.