Studying the early modern split between science and literature and the aftermath of their division

The conception of computers as thinking machines and literature as a social field stems from the early modern phenomenon of competing over the infinite as an object not just of contemplation but of appropriation in a race toward virtual control. The rediscovery of this origin undoes a collective forgetting of what technology and texts have in common, what they don’t, and what they can and ought to be in the future. David L. Sedley offers a new history of literature and science’s disciplinary divide—its origin and significance—tracing a series of points along the emerging frontier between these two fields. At each point there are two objects in play and two authors who push the objects in opposite directions: on the one hand, mechanical arts and the essay, probability theory and the novel, and geometry and epic; on the other, Montaigne and Bacon, Pascal and Lafayette, and Hobbes and Milton. Each of these authors, Sedley shows, tried to render an object either algorithmic or infinite to oppose the other’s efforts. Ultimately, Race to Infinity: Early Modern Distinctions Between Literature and Science illuminates the fortunes of the literary in the digital revolution and beyond.

DAVID L. SEDLEY is the Laurie Ann Levin Professor of Comparative Literature and a professor of French and francophone studies at Haverford College.

 Introduction                                                                                                                

Section I

Chapter 1: Bacon’s Advancement by Algorithm                                                       

Chapter 2: Infinity and Mechanical Arts in Montaigne                                             

Chapter 3: Bacon, Montaigne, and Imperial Naturalization                          

Section II

Chapter 4: Pascal’s Choice of Geometries                                                                 

Chapter 5: Pascal’s Two Minds                                                                                  

Chapter 6: A Mathematical Key to Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves                   

Chapter 7: Lafayette’s Aftermath in Fontenelle’s Physics for Poets             

Section III

Chapter 8: Hobbes’s Algorithmic Epic                                                                      

Chapter 9: The Shrinkage of Leviathan in Paradise Lost                                          

Chapter 10: Driven to Discretion: Hobbes’s Answers to Milton                               

Chapter 11: Hobbes’s Homer Versus Literature                                                        

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes                                                                                       

Bibliography