The game of probability : literature and calculation from Pascal to Kleist / Rudiger Campe ; translated by Ellwood H. Wiggins, Jr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Campe, Rüdiger, author.

Series:

Cultural memory in the present

Standardized Title:

Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit. English

Language:

English

German

Subjects (All):

European literature--17th century--History and criticism.

European literature.

European literature--18th century--History and criticism.

Probability in literature.

Physical Description:

486 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2012.

Summary:

There exist literary histories of probability and scientific histories of probability, but for a long time it was thought that the two did not meet. In The Game of Probability, Rüdiger Campe 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: mathematicians who wanted to solve arithmetical problems to understand games of chance; theologians whose disapproval of gambling stemmed from their belief that chance should remain in God's hands alone; jurists concerned with incorporating unforeseeable events into contracts; natural scientists striving to establish the conditions under which experiments succeed or fail. There were also questions for logicians-and novelists-as to the logical relations between events and the circumstances leading up to them, for the early insurance industry, with its need to assess risk, for civil servants desirous to draw conclusions about productivity from population data, and more. Book jacket.

Contents:

Theology and the law : dice in the air

Numbers and calculus in context : the game of decision; Pascal

Writing the calculation of chances : justice and fair game; Huygens

Probability, a postscript for the doctrine of chances : logic and contractual law; Arnauld, Leibniz, Pufendorf

Probability applied : ancient topoi and the theory of games of chance; Jacob Bernoulli

Continued proclamation : the law of logica probabilium; Leibniz

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, or the improbability of survival

Numbers and tables in narration : jurists and clergymen and their bureaucratic hobbies

Novels and tables : Defoe's A journal of the plague year; Schnabel's Felsenburg Island

The theory of probability and the form of the novel : Daniel Bernoulli on utility value, the anthropology of risk, and Gellert's epistolary fiction

'Improbable probability' : the theory of the novel and its trope; Fielding's Tom Jones and Wieland's Agathon

The appearance of truth : logic, aesthetics, and experimentation; Lambert

'Probable' or 'plausible' : mathematical formula versus philosophical discourse; Kant

Kleist's improbable veracities, or, a romantic ending.

Notes:

"Originally published in German under the title Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit."

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780804768641

0804768641

9780804768658

080476865X

OCLC:

781077747