Reason, Rationality, and Rules: A Short History of the Way We Think Now

This talk will be held at Alumni Hall, Mosher Alumni House, 2nd floor on Thursday April 10 at 4:00 p.m.
About the Speaker
Lorraine Daston is Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. She has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, and Göttingen Universities, as well as at the University of Chicago, where she is Visiting Professor of Social Thought and History. She has also held visiting positions in Paris and Vienna and given the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the University of Oxford (1999), the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University (2002), the West Lectures at Stanford University (2005), and the Humanitas Lecture at the University of Oxford (2013). She has twice won the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society and was awarded the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society and the Schelling Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 2012. Dr. Daston is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding Member of the British Academy, as well as a Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Leopoldina. Dr. Daston was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010. She is currently completing a book on moral and natural orders. Histories of Scientific Observation, co-edited with Elizabeth Lunbeck, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011.