Jessica Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Iowa State University and at MIT before coming to Stanford. Her research interests include Enlightenment science, politics and culture, and the history of scientific explanation. She is the author of "Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment" (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in French history. She is currently writing a book on the idea of the animal-machine, its technological basis and expressions, and its ramifications in philosophy, physiology, culture and politics from Descartes to Darwin. The book's working title is "Mind Out of Matter." In October 2003, she hosted a workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center on the history and philosophy of artificial life, which gave rise to a collection of essays entitled "Genesis Redux," forthcoming in 2007.
Comment: Dan Edelstein
This talk is part of Stanford's Seminar on Science, Technology, and Society.