Lorraine Daston (University of Chicago), “The Masters of Disasters: Legal Liability and Insurance Coverage in the Age of Climate Change” (Dwight H. Terry Lectureship)

Lorraine Daston, Director Emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin and Visiting Professor in in the Committee on Social Thought and History at the University of Chicago, will deliver the 2024 Terry Lectures on  ”Natural Disasters and the Question of Blame.”

 

The idea of the purely natural disaster, for which neither man nor God was to blame, is the Creation of the Enlightenment. This idea lies at the heart of modern metaphysics and ethics: in metaphysics, it drew sharp boundaries between the supernatural, the human, and the natural; in ethics, it posed the quandary of misfortunes that were tragic but nobody’s fault. What happens when we lose the idea of the natural disaster, for which no one is to blame, in the age of anthropogenic climate change, for which everyone is to blame?

 

Receptions to follow each lecture. Register here.