1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910786198803321

Autore

Campe Rùˆdiger

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, California, : Stanford University Press, 2012

ISBN

0-8047-8466-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (503 p.)

Collana

Cultural Memory in the Present

Cultural memory in the present

Altri autori (Persone)

WigginsEllwood

Disciplina

809/.93384

Soggetti

European literature - 17th century - History and criticism

European literature - 18th century - History and criticism

Probability in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

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

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references.

Nota di contenuto

Contents; Introduction; Part I.  Games for Example; 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: Justiceand 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 Out8. Numbers and Tables in Narration: Juristsand 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-Kant14. Kleist's "Improbable Veracities," or, A Romantic



Ending; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography

Sommario/riassunto

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 re