Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging our Infatuation with Numbers

by Michael Mack

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623566494
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/13/2014
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Michael Mack (PhD. Cambridge) is Reader in English Literature and Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. Formerly he has been a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, a Fellow at the University of Sydney, and lecturer and research fellow at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (2010), German Idealism and the Jew (2003), which was shortlisted for The Koret Jewish Book Award 2004, and Anthropology as Memory (Niemeyer, 2001, Conditio Judaica Series).

Table of Contents

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.

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis is an invaluable achievement; it constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in the medical humanities.
Forum for Modern Language Studies

Mack's project in this important book builds upon his previous work, especially that in How Literature Changes the Way We Think (Continuum, 2011). Here he reveals the pseudo-theological foundations of the belief in numbers that ground the current cultural value of the social sciences and in particular economics and medicine as purely rational and objective. ... Throughout his persuasive deconstruction of the West's belief in economics, science, and medicine as value-neutral, Mack further shows how these have appropriated Christian theology's emphasis on eternal life, sin, and redemption as structuring concepts, bearing 'witness to theology's persistence in a non-theological age.' ... Mack effects a change of perspective on not only economics and medicine but also on literature and, by the way, on theology. This book is worth reading with care, pencil in hand, and time.
Religious Studies Review

The book ranges widely over literature and philosophy from Shakespeare and Deleuze to Sylvia Plath, Saint Augustine, Bernard Malamud, and Bernard Williams, among many others. It deals with an important topic: the reductionist nature of contemporary thought, which requires assessment and quantification of everything, including the meaning of life. We have become impoverished, and we have been distracted by that which is "merely objective." But can literature save us? At the very least, it can help us break free from the dominant paradigm and "our infatuation with numbers." Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty.
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From the Publisher

The book ranges widely over literature and philosophy from Shakespeare and Deleuze to Sylvia Plath, Saint Augustine, Bernard Malamud, and Bernard Williams, among many others. It deals with an important topic: the reductionist nature of contemporary thought, which requires assessment and quantification of everything, including the meaning of life. We have become impoverished, and we have been distracted by that which is "merely objective." But can literature save us? At the very least, it can help us break free from the dominant paradigm and "our infatuation with numbers." Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty.

R. White