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London Review of Books

All Curls and Pearls subscriber-only content

Lorraine Daston

  • The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany by Neil Kenny  Buy this book

There has probably never been a society that did not erect barriers to certain kinds of knowledge. Moralists since Greek and Roman antiquity have frowned on busybodies who pry into their neighbours’ private lives; medieval Christian theologians condemned necromancers who wanted to discover the secrets of demons; today we fret about state surveillance of citizens and certain kinds of scientific research on human subjects. Curiosity has never been allowed free rein: there has always been a distinction between good and bad curiosity, legitimate and illegitimate knowledge.

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Lorraine Daston, a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, has written on the history of probability, wonders and scientific objectivity.