Ideals and Practices of Rationality – An Interview with Lorraine Daston

Abstract

Lorraine Daston is a historian of science based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she has directed a research group since 1995. Her career spans five decades and has included award-winning monographs such as Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), Wonders and the Order of Nature (with Katherine Park, 1998), and Objectivity (with Peter Galison, 2007), as well as a large number of collective works. She visited the University of Warwick in March 2017 to deliver the Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecture. In a wide-ranging interview, she spoke about the evolution of the discipline of the history of science; the research programme known as historical epistemology; the nuts and bolts of collaboration in the humanities; her current research on archives in the sciences and the humanities; and the transience of scientific theories.