What Kind of Intelligence Calculates? Prodigies, Drudges, and Machines, 1750-1950

The 31st Annual Lecture of the GHI is being delivered by Lorraine Daston, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s Department II “Ideals and Practices of Rationality.” She has published widely on the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, the emergence of the scientific fact, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. Her current projects include a history of rules, based on her 2014 Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton University, the emergence of Big Science and Big Humanities in the context of nineteenth-century archives, and the relationship between moral and natural orders. In addition to her position at MPIWG, she is a regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

The comment will be provided by Jaime Cohen-Cole, an Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. His research has focused on the how science shapes and has been molded in modern life. His book, Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (University of Chicago, 2014), chronicles the development and promulgation of a scientific vision of the rational, creative, open-minded self in the context of the cold war era.