Lorraine Daston

Lorraine Jenifer Daston (born June 9, 1951) is an American historian of science. She is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and an authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

Lorraine Daston
Born	(1951-06-09) June 9, 1951 East Lansing, Michigan, U.S.
Education	Ph.D., History of Science, Harvard University

Education

• BA studying history and science, Harvard University (1973, summa cum laude)
• Diploma in history and philosophy of science, University of Cambridge (1974)
• PhD in the history of science, Harvard University (1979), supervised by I. Bernard Cohen and Erwin N. Hiebert; dissertation The Reasonable Calculus: Classical Probability Theory 1650-1840

Scholarly activities

Daston divides her year between a nine-month period in Berlin, and a three-month period in Chicago, where she usually teaches a seminar and assists doctoral students.

In 2002, she delivered two Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, in which she traced theoretical conceptions of nature in several literary and philosophical works. In 2006, she gave the British Academy's Master-Mind Lecture. Daston was appointed the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford for 2012-2013. She has also served as Oxford's Isaiah Berlin Lecturer in the History of Ideas April-May 1999.

Daston was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Princeton University in 2013. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017. In 2018, she received the Dan David Prize. In 2024 she was awarded the Balzan Prize for "History of Modern and Contemporary Science".

She is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry. She is a contributor to the London Review of Books.

Personal life

Daston married the German psychologist and social scientist Gerd Gigerenzer.

Bibliography

Monographs

• Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate, Columbia Global Reports 2023, ISBN 979-8987053560.
• Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, Princeton University Press 2022, ISBN 978-0691254081.
• Against Nature, MIT Press 2019, ISBN 978-0262537339. doi:10.7551/mitpress/12267.001.0001
• with Peter Galison: Objectivity, Zone Books 2007, ISBN 978-1890951795.
• Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: zur Geschichte der Rationalität, Fischer Verlag 2001, ISBN 978-3596147632.
• Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit, Siemens-Stiftung 2001.
• with Katharine Park: Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, Zone Books 1998, ISBN 978-0942299915.
• Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press 1988, ISBN 978-0691084978.

As editor

• with Elizabeth Lunbeck: Histories of scientific observation, University of Chicago Press 2011, ISBN 978-0226136776.
• with Michael Stolleis: Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe, Ashgate 2008, ISBN 978-0754657613
• with Katharine Park: The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3: Early Modern Science, Cambridge University Press 2006, ISBN 978-1107553668
• with Fernando Vidal: The Moral Authority of Nature, University of Chicago Press 2003, ISBN 978-0226136813.
• Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press 2000, ISBN 978-0226136721.
• with Lorenz Krüger and Michael Heidelberger: The Probabilistic Revolution, Vol. 1: Ideas in History, MIT Press 1987, ISBN 978-0262111188

Articles (selection)

• with Moritz Stefaner & Jen Christiansen: "The language of science". 175 Years of Discovery. Scientific American. 323 (3): 2020, 24–31.
• "Before the Two Cultures: Big Science and Big Humanities in the Nineteenth Century". Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. IX (1): 2015. brief description, Bookstore, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
• "The Disciplines of Attention," in David E. Wellbery, ed., A New History of German Literature, Harvard University Press Reference Library, 2005.
• "The Morality of Natural Orders: The Power of Medea" and "Nature's Customs versus Nature's Laws". Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, 2002.
• "The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment". Science in Context. 4 (2): 1991, pp. 367-386. doi:10.1017/S0269889700001010
• "Degrees of Wrinkledness". London Review of Books, 46 (21). [A review of the book Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology by Gregory Radick, The University of Chicago Press, 2023.]

Quotes

“The-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” goes a long way to explain most scientific controversies I’m familiar with; so much so, that one wonders why it is that such debates so quickly and permanently become polemically polarized. The long after-life of the medieval disputation-cum-duel?..

External links

• Lorraine Daston Max Planck IWG profile page
• Lorraine Daston John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought profile page
• The Observer (Article about Daston in MaxPlanckResearch, magazine of the Max Planck Society 2012
• What isn't the History of Knowledge (Dan David Prize 2018, 8.5.18) on YouTube
• "Rules Rule: How Enlightenment Reason Became Cold War Rationality" (Video of Lecture at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2010)
• "Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment" (Lecture at McGill University, 2006)