Background
Daston, Lorraine Jenifer was born on June 9, 1951 in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. Daughter of Paul George and Marie Panoria Daston.
( What did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason?...)
What did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason? Classical probabilists from Jakob Bernouli through Pierre Simon Laplace intended their theory as an answer to this question--as "nothing more at bottom than good sense reduced to a calculus," in Laplace's words. In terms that can be easily grasped by nonmathematicians, Lorraine Daston demonstrates how this view profoundly shaped the internal development of probability theory and defined its applications.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069100644X/?tag=2022091-20
( Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize...)
Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize"This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than opposed to one another."-- From the IntroductionWonders and the Order of Nature is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0942299914/?tag=2022091-20
historian university professor
Daston, Lorraine Jenifer was born on June 9, 1951 in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. Daughter of Paul George and Marie Panoria Daston.
AB, Harvard University, 1973. Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1979. Diploma, University Cambridge, England, 1974.
Executive director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, she is considered 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. 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.
Her Chicago seminars usually take a textualist approach to philosophical, literary, and historical works.
In a research capacity at MPIWG she heads the "Ideals and Practices of Rationality" working group, and has concentrated recently on the late-Enlightenment philosophical conceptualization of reason, and the subsequent rise of a rationality based in algorithms and rules. A frequent subject of past inquiry has been the naturalistic fallacy in philosophy and literature, or "the almost irresistible temptation to attempt to extract moral norms from the world of nature." Daston was appointed the inaugural Humanitas Professor in the History of Ideas at University of Oxford for 2013.
She has also held Oxford"s Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in Intellectual History. In 2002, she delivered two Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, in which she traced theoretical conceptions of nature in several literary and philosophical works.
A number of her scholarly articles have been published in the journal of humanistic criticism Critical Inquiry.
She also holds a seat on that journal"s editorial board, and a recent feature on Daston can be seen on the Critical Inquiry website.
( What did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason?...)
( Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize...)
( Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises....)
Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science. Member American History Association, History Science Society (council 1986-1989), Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (Pfizer Prize 1989, 99), Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi.
Married Gerd Johann Gigerenzer, October 25, 1985. 1 child, Thalia.