Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Ghosts of Departed Quantities: Samuel Beckett and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics

  • 644 Accesses

Abstract

Samuel Beckett was attracted to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: inventor of the Calculus, the mastery of which Beckett lacked; author of the Monadology, which he hugely admired; and proponent of pre-established harmony, the theology and optimism of which he found absurd. Few studies of Beckett and Leibniz have noted (and but fleetingly) how the mathematics of Leibniz inform his other writings. Beckett’s knowledge of the Calculus was minimal, but he appreciated its importance within the Western mathematical tradition, of which he had a good knowledge; and he found in Berkeley’s criticism of the calculus of Newton and Leibniz a mode of mathematical analysis that defined indelibly his outlook on and his representations of substance, identity, infinity, divinity, and nothing.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 149.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 199.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 199.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Ackerley, Chris. 2010a. Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy. 1998 & 2004; rpt. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2010b. Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt. 2005; rpt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2010c. “Samuel Beckett and Science.” In The Blackwell Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, 143–64. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. “Monadology: Samuel Beckett and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.” In Beckett/Philosophy, edited by Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani, 140–61. Sofia: University Press “St. Klimrnt Ohridski.”.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. “The Geometry of the Imagination.” In Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies: New Critical Essays, edited by Peter Fifield and David Addyman, 85–107. London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. “Samuel Beckett and the Physical Continuum.” Journal of Beckett Studies 25 (1): 110–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ackerley, Chris J., and S. E. Gontarski. 2004. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aristotle. 1957. Physics. Translated by P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford. 2 vols. 1929; rev. & rpt. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press [Loeb Classical Library].

    Google Scholar 

  • Beckett, Samuel. [1934–1938?]. “Whoroscope Notebook.” Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. RUL MS 4000/1.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1992. Dream of Fair to middling Women. Edited by Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier. Dublin: Black Cat Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1999. Beckett’s Dream Notebook. Edited by John Pilling. Reading: Beckett International Foundation.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. 4 vols. Edited by Paul Auster. New York: Grove Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2009. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume I: 1929–1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berkeley, George. 1734. The Analyst, or a Discourse addressed to an Infidel Mathematician. Wikisource. Accessed 6 March 2018.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bergamini, David, ed. 1963. Mathematics. New York: Time [Life Science Library].

    Google Scholar 

  • Boyer, Carl B. 1989. A History of Mathematics. 1968; 2nd ed.. Revised by Uta C. Merzbach. New York: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brunet, Pierre Gustave. 1861. Curiosités théologiques par un bibliophile. Paris: Adolphe Delahays, Libraire-Éditeur.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burnet, John. 1950. Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato. 1914; rpt. London: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carey, Rosalind, and John Ongley. 2009. Historical Dictionary of Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy. Toronto: Scarecrow Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cordingley, Anthony. 2018. Samuel Beckett’s How It Is: Philosophy in Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Culik, Hugh. 1993. “Mathematics as Metaphor: Samuel Beckett and the Esthetics of Incompleteness.” Papers on Language and Literature 29: 131–51.

    Google Scholar 

  • ————. 2013. “Science and Mathematics.” In Samuel Beckett in Context, edited by Anthony Ullmann, 348–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dowd, Garin. 1998. “Nomadology: Reading the Beckett Baroque.” Journal of Beckett Studies 8 (1): 15–49.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1999. “Mud as the Plane of Immanence in How It Is.” Journal of Beckett Studies 8, no. 2: 1–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eliot, T. Stearns. 1916. “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centers.” The Monist 26 (4): 566–76.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellis, Reuben J. 1993. “‘Matrix of Surds’: Heisenberg’s Algebra in Beckett’s Murphy.” In Papers on Language and Literature (1989); rpt. in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, edited by Lance St John Butler, 362–65. Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feldman, Matthew. 2006. Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes.” London and New York: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. “Samuel Beckett, Wilhelm Windelband and Nominalist Philosophy.” In Beckett/Philosophy, edited by Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani, 110–39. Sofia: University Press “St. Klimrnt Ohridski.”.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. “Philosophy.” In Samuel Beckett in Context, edited by Anthony Ullmann, 301–11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gaultier, Jules de. 1900. De Kant à Nietzsche. Paris: Mercure de France.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geulincx, Arnoldus. 1891–1893. Opera Philosophica, recognivit J. P. N. Land. 3 vols, Hague Comitum: Martinum Nijhoff.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heisenberg, Werner. 1957. Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, with an Introduction by F. S. C. Northrop. New York: Harper & Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Irvine, Andrew David. “Principia Mathematica.” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/principia-mathematica/. First published 1996; substantive revision March 10, 2015; accessed 12 April 2018.

  • Jourdain, Philip E. B. 1916. “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).” The Monist 26 (4): 481–85.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kline, Morris. 1953. Mathematics in Western Culture. London, Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Knowlson, James. 1996. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lees, Heath. 1983. “Watt: Music Tuning and Tonality.” Journal of Beckett Studies 9: 5–24.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leibniz, Gottfried. 1898. The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Robert Latta. London: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus]. 2002. De Rerum Natura. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse (1924); rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (1975). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press [Loeb Classical Library].

    Google Scholar 

  • Mauthner, Fritz. 1923. Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache. 3 vols, Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner.

    Google Scholar 

  • Monk, Ray. 1990. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Jonathan Cape.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nixon, Mark. 2011. Samuel Beckett’s German Dairies 1936–1937. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Phillips, Holly. 2015. “Samuel Beckett and the Nominalist Ethic.” PhD dissertation, University of Otago.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. “‘What I Want Is the Straws, Flotsam, etc’: Beckett and the Nominalist Ethic of Humility.” Journal of Beckett Studies 25 (1): 56–77.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 1996a. “Beckett’s Ghosts and Fluxions.” Samuel Beckett Today Aujourd’hui, vol. 5, Beckett & La Psychoanalyse & Psychoanalysis, edited by Sjef Houppermans, 23–40. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

    Google Scholar 

  • ——— 1996b. The Ghosts of Modernity. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russell, Bertrand. 1900. A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, with an Appendix of Leading Passages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sorley, William Ritchie. 1882 [1929]. “Leibniz.” In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 13. 1882; rpt. London and New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 886.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stevens, Brett. 2010. “A Purgatorial Calculus: Beckett’s Mathematics in ‘Quad.’” In The Blackwell Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski, 164–81. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tonning, Erik. 2007. Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen, 1962–1985. Berne: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Windelband, Wilhelm. 1901. A History of Philosophy, with Special Reference to the Formation and Development of Its Problems and Conceptions. Translated by James Tufts. 1893; 2nd ed., rev., London: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated and edited by Frank F. Ramsey and C. K. Ogden.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. London: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Chris Ackerley

Authors
  1. Chris Ackerley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chris Ackerley .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Robert Tubbs

  2. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Alice Jenkins

  3. Department for English Literatures, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Nina Engelhardt

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Ackerley, C. (2021). The Ghosts of Departed Quantities: Samuel Beckett and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In: Tubbs, R., Jenkins, A., Engelhardt, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55478-1_18

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation