The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist by Rüdiger Campe, Trans. Ellwood H. Wiggins Jr. (review)

Abstract

Rudiger Campe, The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist. Trans. Ellwood H. Wiggins Jr. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. 486 pp.Consider the constellation of issues that come together in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: fascination with games of chance, some of the most powerful mathematical tools ever developed (indeed, the mathematization of nature and life), notions of aesthetic play, theories of probability, the rise of the (realistic, probabilistic) novel, deand revaluation of traditional rhetoric, the changing status of the (rhetorical) example and (scientific) case. And consider some of the great thinkers and writers of this period: Leibniz, Pascal, Huygens, Fermat, Defoe, Bernoulli, Fielding, Wieland, Lambert, Kant, Kleist. Assume the following theses: The inextricable relationship between what would later be divided into the natural sciences and the humanities made eighteenth-century probability theory revolutionary (3).[T]he relation of chance and calculation, contingency and systemwasa fundamental condition of modernity (1 l).Mathematical probability and the aesthetic appearance of truth are connected not merely through their common derivation from the logical-poetological term 'probability.' In the eighteenth century, they still belonged to a common space of discussion and thinking (197-98). Now you have an idea of the focus and breadth of Campe's study and will forgive the reviewer for not being able to do it complete justice.A laudable translation of Campe's 2002 monograph, Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit: Literatur und Berechnung zwischen Pascal und Kleist, this book offers a of knowledge (7, 98) and not either a mere history of the science of probability or a mere literary history of the novel (both of which exist in many varieties and are well referenced). Campe insists that only when calculations of games of chance become examples for other things can a full-blown theory of probability emerge and that it was precisely a continuation of the rhetorical tradition and the rise of the novel that offered such examples. Hence, the humanities and mathematical sciences must be seen as engaged in negotiations of understanding and computation (98) if the complex origins of modernity are to be fully grasped. Part 1 explores how attempts by the likes of Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, and Jacob Bernoulli to provide calculations for games of chance intersected with a variety of theological, legal, and logical issues and became models of probabuity, whue part 2 looks especially at the vocabulary of phuosophical argumentation and narrative poetics that allowed probability to become a historical force (98).The crux of Campe's interests is the connection between these two parts. The feet that the German term for both mathematical and rhetorical/poetical verisimilitude, Wahrscheinlichkeit, contains an ambiguity-Schein as semblance and appearance of truth-allows for a phenomenologization of aesthetics (196). …