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
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)
George Herbert, “The Rose“
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961) and The Futurological Congress (1971)
Recall This Book 