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Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis
Challenging our Infatuation with Numbers
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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.
Review
“Erudite and incisive, Michael Mack crucially poises literary and philosophical events and contestations. The book explores rhetorical as well as conceptual operations capable of taking out some of our abiding–and culturally pernicious–attachment disorders.”
– Avital Ronell, University Professor of the Humanities, and Professor of Comparative Literature and German, New York University, USA
“Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis is a stunningly brilliant analysis of our increasingly digitalized culture that celebrates the quantifiable conceptions of the good life. Drawing upon a polymathic erudition, Mack challenges the regnant epistemological and disciplinary dichotomies that sustain an opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, which, in turn, sponsor fetishistic adoration of the scientific and economic paradigms that has led to the eclipse of the ethical as the ultimate arbiter of a life worth living.”
– Paul Mendes-Flohr, Professor of Modern Jewish Thought, the Divinity School, University of Chicago, USA, and Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
“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, Creighton University, CHOICE
“Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis is, very consciously, a timely book. The crisis of the title is the political climate in which higher education in the arts and humanities currently finds itself. … In addressing its subject at a fundamental and foundational level, it interrogates the basic conditions which underlie contemporary attitudes to the arts and their uses, illuminating the genealogy of modern ideology in our theological inheritance and the anxieties attending the creep of secularisation over the last two hundred years. … Its rich and often philosophically-complex synthetic sections should appeal to specialists throughout the arts and humanities who desire a greater insight into the processes by which their field has been rendered marginal.”
– Benjamin Pickford (University of Nottingham, UK), U.S. Studies Online
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).