On November 12, 2009, Lorraine Daston, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin presented "Observation as a Way of Life: Time, Attention, Allegory" as part of Gallatin's Distinguished Faculty Lecture series.
Lorraine Daston 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 is currently completing a book on "Moral and Natural Orders" and co-editing a volume on "Histories of Scientific Observation." Professor Daston has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, and Göttingen Universities, and at University of Chicago, where she is Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought. She has also held visiting positions in Paris and Vienna and gave the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at Oxford University (1999), the West Lectures at Stanford University (2005, and the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University (2002). Among her recent publications are "Objectivity" (co-authored Peter Galison) and "Thinking with Animals" (co-authored with Gregg Mitmann); she has also co-edited "Things that Talk, The Moral Authority of Nature", and the early modern volume of "The Cambridge History of Science". Two of her books, "Classical Probability in the Enlightenment", and "Wonders of Nature" (co-authored with Katharine Park), were awarded the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize.
Presented as part of the Distinguished Faculty Lectures by the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
