Our Books in Dark Times series offered John this 2021 chance to speak with Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her list of publications outstrips our capacity to mention here; John particularly admires her analysis of “epistemic virtues” such as truth to nature and objectivity in her 2007 Objectivity (coauthored with Peter Galison).

Although she “came of age in an era of extreme contextualism” Daston is anything but time-bound. She starts things off in John’s wheelhouse with Henry James, before moving on to Pliny the Younger–no, not the scientist, the administrator! Then she makes a startling flanking maneuver to finish with contemporary Polish poetry. John puffs to keep up…

Discussed in this episode:

• Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
• (Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, American abroad, in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady)
• Pliny the Younger, Letters (“the very model of the good civil servant”)
• Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty
• Ovid, Tristia
• Zbigniew Herbert, e.g. Mr. Cogito
• Wislawa Szymborska View with a Grain of Sand
• D. H. Lawrence, “Snake” (and other animal poems)
• Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (“This [octopus encounter] is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”)
• George Herbert, “The Rose“
• Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
• Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961) and The Futurological Congress (1971)

Listen and Read:

41 RTB Books in Dark Times 13: Lorraine Daston, Historian of Science

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