Lorraine Daston’s Historical Epistemology: Style, Program, and School

Abstract

This chapter explores the style of historical epistemology developed by Lorraine Daston. We show how the author elaborated a critical dialogue with the French tradition of historical epistemology (namely, Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault) and with the field of science studies, intending to integrate the history of science into history tout court. Studying the series of collective books organized in the recent decades by the American historian and her institutional activities, especially in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, we slowly see the emergence of a new research program around historical epistemology and a school to disseminate it. We take her book Objectivity (with Peter Galison) as an example of this way of writing history. Through this book, we outline some contributions of Daston’s thought to contemporary historiography and to the understanding of modern science.