Objectivity

This is a deeply researched book that will make you think. It is beautiful, and it is important….I recommend it to anyone—optimist or pessimist, female or male—with a healthy dash of curiosity and a cranium.

Daston and Galison’s book will take its place among the most distinguished histories of the making of scientific knowledge.

A truly outstanding book that will hopefully shape our future vision of what is meant by objectivity, from an epistemic as well as from an ethical (and aesthetical) point of view.

As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison point out in their capacious and engaging study of the concept of scientific objectivity from the 17th century to the present day, the universal form is key to understanding how modern science moved from the study of curiosities, through the representations of perfect, notional specimens, to a concept of objectivity as responsibility for science.

The author’s argument here is complicated but fascinating (and, because the argument is about images, the book is beautiful).

This is a surprising, engrossing book that treats humanity’s struggle to unsnarl the world and itself as a field of endless turmoil and fascination.

We need history of science in the style of Daston and Galison: a history of science that commands the details but at the same time discerns the shape of larger developmentsand that makes us realize just how many meanings have been packed into the little word ‘objectivity,’ which rolls so trippingly off the tongue.

Lorraine Daston is Director at 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. She is the coauthor (with Katharine Park) of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 and (with Peter Galison) Objectivity and the editor of Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, all three published by Zone Books. Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, among other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999).