The Game of Probability : Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist.
Title:
The Game of Probability : Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist.
Author:
Campe, Rüdiger.
ISBN:
9780804784665
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (317 pages)
Series:
Cultural Memory in the Present
Contents:
Copyright -- Title Page -- Series Editors -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I. Games for Example: Modeling Probability -- 1. Theology and the Law: Dice in the Air -- 2. Numbers and Calculation in Context: The Game of Decision-Pascal -- 3. Writing the Calculation of Chances: Justice and Fair Game-Christiaan Huygens -- 4. Probability, a Postscript to the Theory of Chance: Logic and Contractual Law-Arnauld, Leibniz, Pufendorf -- 5. Probability Applied: Ancient Topoi and the Theory of Games of Chance-Jacob Bernoulli -- 6. Continued Proclamations: The Law of logica probabilium-Leibniz -- 7. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, or, The Improbability of Survival -- Part II. Verisimilitude Spelled Out: The Appearance of Truth -- 8. Numbers and Tables in Narration: Jurists and Clergymen and Their Bureaucratic Hobbies -- 9. Novels and Tables: Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and Schnabel's Die Insel Felsenburg -- 10. The Theory of Probability and the Form of the Novel: Daniel Bernoulli on Utility Value, the Anthropology of Risk, and Gellert's Epistolary Fiction -- 11. "Improbable Probability": The Theory of the Novel and Its Trope-Fielding's Tom Jones and Wieland's Agathon -- 12. The Appearance of Truth: Logic, Aesthetics, and Experimentation-Lambert -- 13. "Probable" or "Plausible": Mathematical Formula Versus Philosophical Discourse-Kant -- 14. Kleist's "Improbable Veracities," or, A Romantic Ending -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Series List.
Abstract:
There exist literary histories of probability and scientific histories of probability, but it has generally been thought that the two did not meet. Campe begs to differ. Mathematical probability, he argues, took over the role of the old probability of poets, orators, and logicians, albeit in scientific terms. Indeed, mathematical probability would not even have been possible without the other probability, whose roots lay in classical antiquity. The Game of Probability revisits the seventeenth and eighteenth-century "probabilistic revolution," providing a history of the relations between mathematical and rhetorical techniques, between the scientific and the aesthetic. This was a revolution that overthrew the "order of things," notably the way that science and art positioned themselves with respect to reality, and its participants included a wide variety of people from as many walks of life. Campe devotes chapters to them in turn. Focusing on the interpretation of games of chance as the model for probability and on the reinterpretation of aesthetic form as verisimilitude (a critical question for theoreticians of that new literary genre, the novel), the scope alone of Campe's book argues for probability's crucial role in the constitution of modernity.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
Click to View