Titled Which Self? The Rationalities of Self-Interest from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, this year’s Stephen M. Straker Memorial Lecture will be presented by Lorraine J. Daston, one of the world’s leading historians of science. Drawing from her own work on the history of conceptions of reason and rationality, Prof. Daston will explore the complex interaction between rationality and interestedness. Join us as she addresses important questions such as how reason can be, at one time, conceived as intrinsically disinterested and, at another, necessarily directed toward the rational agent’s self-interest.Speaker
Speaker
Lorraine J. Daston is one of the world’s leading historians of science, is Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Daston has held visiting or continuing appointments with institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, Göttingen, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She has also held fellowships in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung in Bielefeld, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institut des études avancées in Paris. In 2012, Daston was awarded the History of Science Society’s George Sarton Medal, a lifetime achievement award that is given annually to an outstanding historian of science from the international community. Daston’s Straker Lecture will be drawn from her continuing work on the history of rationality.
Information About the Stephen Straker Memorial Lecture
Stephen Straker (1942-2004) was an historian of science at UBC for thirty years and the chief inspiration for the creation of the STS program. We honour his memory with an annual distinguished lecture. Stephen was an award-winning teacher; some of his own undergraduate lectures in history of science have been preserved here: http://www.archive.org/details/StephenStrakerLecture1a
***To attend this year’s Straker Lecture, click here.***