In Person | Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

John Austin Seminars - Rules: A Short History of What We Live By 

Speaker: Lorraine Daston, Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and History

Chair: George Letsas, Professor of Philosophy of Law, UCL Laws 

About the Seminar:

Lorraine Daston will conduct a seminar of her book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022), consisting of a brief introduction by the author to the book’s main themes, remarks by 3 commentators, and responses by the author, followed by general discussion. 

Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don’t, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.

Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change―how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don’t, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines.

About the Speaker: 

Lorraine Daston is Director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her work spans a broad range of topics in the early modern and modern history of science, including probability and statistics, wonders and the order of nature, scientific images, objectivity and other epistemic virtues, quantification, observation, algorithms, and the moral authority of nature.  Her most recent books are Against Nature (2019), Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022) and Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (2023). 

 

About the Commentators: 

Jonathan Gingerich is Associate Professor of Law and Associate Graduate Faculty in Philosophy at Rutgers University and Principal Investigator for ‘The Spontaneity of Freedom’ project at University College London Department of Philosophy. Recent publications include; ‘Spontaneous Freedom’ (Ethics, 2022); ‘Is Spotify Bad for Democracy? Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Democracy, and Law’ (Yale Journal of Law and Technology, 2022); and ‘Democratic Vibes’ (William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, 2024).

Ulrike Hahn is a professor at the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she also serves as director of the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Modelling. Her research interests include categorization, similarity, language and language acquisition, and questions of rationality involved in human judgment, decision-making, and everyday argument. She was awarded the Cognitive Section Prize by the British Psychological Society, the Kerstin Hesselgren Professorship by the Swedish Research Council, and the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is a fellow of the German National Academy of Science (Leopoldina) and a fellow of the APS, and recently received an honorary doctorate from Lund University, Sweden.  Hahn is a qualified lawyer in Germany.

Kevin Toh is the Professor of Philosophy of Law at the UCL Faculty of Laws.  He was formerly an Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University in Bloomington.  He is the author of a number of articles in philosophy of law, philosophical ethics, and constitutional theory, and a co-editor of Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence (OUP 2019).  Toh was a law clerk for Associate Justice Charles Fried at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in the 1997-98 term.  

Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022). Please click here, to purchase the book. 

Book your ticket here

Upcoming dates in the John Austin Seminars: 

24 February 2025 – Daniella Dover (Oxford) 
10 March 2025 - David Enoch (Oxford) 
12 May 2025 – Elise Woodard (KCL)