About

Lorraine Daston is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a regular visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her work focuses on the history of rationality, especially but not exclusively scientific rationality. She has written extensively on topics such as the history of wonder, objectivity, observation, the moral authority of nature, probability, Cold War rationality, and scientific modernity. Her current book projects include a history of rules and an inquiry into the relationship between the moral and natural orders.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Law
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Art
• Media studies
• Psychology
• Ancient history
• Pedagogy
• Literature
• Economic history
• Geography
• Biology
• Genealogy
• Epistemology
• Ethnology
• Demography
• Virology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• « Ian était fier d’être inclassable »

  Zilsel · 2026-02-10

  article1st authorCorresponding

  L’historienne des sciences Lorraine Daston a entretenu, avec Ian Hacking, un long dialogue intellectuel qui a couru des années 1980 aux années 2010. Des premiers questionnements sur la statistique aux réflexions sur une définition opératoire de l’épistémologie historique, en passant par la problématisation de la notion d’objectivité, ce sont de multiples objets et interrogations qui ont nourri leurs échanges. Cette diversité des prises et des enjeux épistémiques ne doit cependant pas cacher qu’une même trame sous-tend les travaux de Lorraine Daston et de Ian Hacking : restituer la profondeur temporelle et analytique de notions d’histoire des sciences telles que celles de probabilité ou d’objectivité) leur profondeur temporelle et analytique. Un seul point (mais d’importance) les sépare : Lorraine Daston ne franchit pas le seuil de la philosophie, domaine natif de Ian Hacking dont il s’est ensuite ingénié à franchir allégrement les frontières. Dans l’entretien que nous avons mené avec l’historienne des sciences, nous sommes donc revenus sur ses lectures des travaux de Hacking et les échanges qu’elle a entretenus avec lui au cours du temps. Il s’est agi de restituer les termes d’un dialogue continu, tonique et (toujours) surprenant.

  PublisherDOI

• Co-authorship in Early Modern European Science

  2025-12-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Objectivity and Impartiality

  2025-09-26 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750

  Zone Books · 2025-12-16 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
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• Rigour and the Disciplines

  Liverpool University Press eBooks · 2025-02-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment

  2024-10-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In eighteenth-century Enlightenment natural history, what distinguished genuine naturalists in the eyes of their peers was not professional status, but rather the practice of heroic observation, described as at once a talent, a discipline, and a method. None sufficed without the others. Attentive observation was firmly distinguished from mere seeing, and even from remarking upon. In his letters to the naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, the young Charles Bonnet dismissed his own earlier observations on caterpillars as what “mediocre attention could perceive,” since he “was not yet well instructed in all the precautions required for the exactitude of an observation.” 1 To observe an object attentively meant first and foremost to observe it distinctly, which the naturalists defined as a kind of mental as well as visual dissection. Microscopes and magnifying glasses were standard tools of the trade, and some of the most vaunted feats of observation in nineteenth-century history, such as fellow naturalist Jan Swammerdam's remarkable account of the ovaries of the queen bee, were anatomies of minutiae: the intestines of a caterpillar or the subcutaneous membranes of plants.

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• THE POWER OF EXEMPLA AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE HUMANITIES

  2024-03-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Book Review: Perspectives all the way downReview of Geoffrey Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça, <i>Of Jaguars and Butterflies: Metalogues on Issues in Anthropology and Philosophy</i>

  Interdisciplinary Science Reviews · 2024-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Ian Macdougall Hacking (1936–2023)

  Isis · 2024-02-26 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• AHS volume 78 issue 3 Cover and Front matter

  Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales · 2023-09-01

  articleOpen access

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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Frequent coauthors

• Pierre‐François Souyri

  University of Cambridge

  344 shared

• André Orléan

  344 shared

• François Hartog

  University of Cambridge

  344 shared

• Christian Lamouroux

  École des Hautes Études en Santé Publique

  344 shared

• Laurent Thévenot

  344 shared

• Sandro Carocci

  University of Rome Tor Vergata

  344 shared

• Jacques Revel

  344 shared

• Jane Burbank

  École des hautes études en sciences sociales

  344 shared