Data Mining: The Critique of Artificial Reason, 1963-2005

with the support of the Leibniz Fund, and previously the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations

The Genealogy of Frivolity: Mathematical Formalism and its Discontents in the European Enlightenment

with the support of the Defining Wisdom Project

Working Papers

Sovereignty, Genealogy, History: The Technical and Decorous in Leibniz's Courtly Work

From Sociability to Vis-Viva: Emilie Du Châtelet on Social and Natural Order (under review)

Decorum, discovery and magical thinking, Leibniz to 'DataViz’

Publications

“How We Became Instrumentalists (Again): Data Positivism since World War II.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 48, no. 5 (November 1, 2018): 673–84.

The spy who pwned me, Limn, edd. Chris Kelty and Biella Coleman, Issue 8.

“Calculating Machine” in Maria-Rosa Antognazza, ed. Oxford Handbook of Leibniz (forthcoming, Oxford)

“Calculating Devices and Computers,” Companion to the History of Science, ed. Bernie Lightman (Wiley, 2016) Preprint

"Querying the Archive: Database Mining from Apriori to Page-Rank,"Science in the Archive, Lorraine Daston, ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2017) Preprint

Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

with the support of the Leibniz Fund and National Science Foundation

“Data and Hubris” in Rachel Schutt and Cathy O'Neill, eds. Doing Data Science (O'Reilly, 2014)

“Reason, Calculating Machines and Efficient Causation” in Tad Schmaltz, ed. Efficient Causation: The History of a Concept (Oxford, 2014)

“Space, Evidence, and the Authority of Mathematics in the Eighteenth Century” in Aaron Garrett, ed. Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (Routledge, 2014)

“Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property,” Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, eds., Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012)

“d(scientist)/dt,” Science 333(2011):1382-3. (Review of Peter Harrison, Ronald Numbers and Michael H. Shank, eds. Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011]).

Essay review of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, (2007), Metascience, 21 (2012).

Essay review of Emilie Du Châtelet, Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings. Bour and Zinsser, trans. (2009) H-France 11(2011), No. 229.

"Matters of Fact” [Essay review of Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange (Yale 2007)] Modern Intellectual History 7,3 (2010): 629-642.

The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue (University of Chicago Press, 2006). See now Stéphane Van Damme's essay review (Eng.) (Fr.) in Annales HSS 2012/1.

“Three Errors about Indifference: Pascal on the Vacuum, Sociability and Moral Freedom,” Romance Quarterly 50(2003):99-120.

“Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal, the Vacuum and the Pensées,”  Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 32(2001):139-181.

“Descartes' Geometry as Spiritual Exercise,” Critical Inquiry, 28(2001): 40-71; reprinted in Bill Brown, ed. Things. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 40-71.