Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis : Challenging Our Infatuation With Numbers / Michael Mack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mack, Michael, 1969- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and society.

Literature--Philosophy.

Literature.

Numbers in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (249 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"Highlighting literature and philosophy's potential impact on economics, health care, bioethics, public policy and theology, this book analyses the heuristic value of fiction. It alerts us to how we risk succumbing to the deceptions of fiction in our everyday lives, because fictional representations constantly feign to be of the real and claim a reality of their own. Philosophy and literature disclose how the substantive sphere of social, economic and medical practice is sometimes driven and shaped by the affect-ridden and subjective. Analysing a wide range of literature--from Augustine, Shakespeare, Spinoza and Deleuze to Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Littell--Michael Mack rethinks ethical attitudes towards the long or eternal life. In so doing he shows how philosophy and literature turn representation against itself to expose the hollowness of theologically grand concepts that govern our secular approach towards ethics, economics and medicine. Philosophy and literature help us resist our current infatuation with numbers and the numerical and contribute towards a future politics that is at once singular and diverse"--Bloomsbury Publishing.

"Analyses the heuristic value of fiction by highlighting literature and philosophy's potential impact on economics, health care, bioethics, public policy and theology"--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note:

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Objects and number: Our Current Infatuation

Chapter 1. What is it about Numbers?

Chapter 2. Playing the Numbers: Ethics and Economics

Chapter 3. Certainty and the Predictability of Numbers: the question of Literary Ethics

Chapter 4. A Disenchantment with Numbers: Philosophy and Literature

Chapter 5. Medicine and the Limits of Numbers

Chapter 6. Towards a Numerical Ambiguity

Conclusion: From Numbers to the Individual: A New Ethics of Subjectivity

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781628927030

1628927038

9781623568450

1623568455

9781623569792

1623569796

OCLC:

869735669