Admiration, Fear, and Infinity in Pascal’s Thinking (Philosophy Begins in Wonder. An Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy, Theology and Science, Ed. Michael Funk Deckard, Peter Losonczi, Eugene (Oregon), Pickwick Publication, 2009, 119-127.) (original) (raw)

PASCAL: The Ignored Philosopher

Blaise Pascal has been viewed as a major modern philosopher but today is being increasingly ignored. One of my passions is philosophy and I was shocked to discover that the famous Pascal was totally ignored in the popular “Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers” (2010) and “The Story of Philosophy” by Bryan Magee (1998) and “The Oxford Companion to Philosophy” (1995). However, he does merit a four page entry by RH Popkin (Emeritus Philosophy Professor, Washington University-St. Louis, MO) in “Great Thinkers of the Western World” (1992) and a substantial write-up in Wikipedia. Even a Google search on the word Pascal first lists the scientific unit of pressure named in his honour. This essay will examine this major omission of Pascal from the ranks of the principal philosophers of Western Europe. We shall show that he annoyed too many powerful people both then and later, so it was easier to omit him than confront his radical, independent philosophical/religious thinking, while acknowledging his major mathematical achievements and minor scientific research.

Pascal and the Persistence of Platonism in Early Modern Thought

The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, 2012

The following paper argues that Blaise Pascal, in spite of his famous opposition between the God of the Philosophers and the God of “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” has significant affinities with the tradition of Renaissance Platonism and is in fact a Platonist in his overall outlook. This is shown in three ways. Firstly, it is argued that Pascal’s skeptical fideism has roots in the notion of faith developed in post-Plotinian neo-Platonism. Secondly, it is argued that Pascal makes considerable use of the Platonic notion of an indefinite dyadic principle. Thirdly, it is argued that Pascal’s religious psychology gives a centrality to the body that brings it close to the theurgical standpoint of figures like Iamblichus. Pascal is then contrasted to figures like Cusanus and Pico in that a dyadic principle of opposition is more prominent in his work than a triadic logic of mediation.

'Where then is the self?' Pascal's Critique of the Ego

An apt title for a longer essay on Blaise Pascal-the French, seventeenth century scientist, mathematician, philosopher and theologist-developed along a chronological line, could be: from nothing to nothing. The first 'nothing' plays a pivotal role in one of his earliest contributions to the field of physics, and concerns the discussion about the possibility of a vacuum in nature. For more than two thousand years, first by the Aristotelian philosophy of nature, then subsequently supported by Christian theology and philosophy, the existence of nothing, a pure void within the plenitude of being was considered as an impossibility, an odd idea contradicting the widely shared conviction that nature abhors a vacuum. Of course, Pascal was not the first to perform experiments with tubes filled with mercury, water or wine to produce the remarkable creation of seemingly-as we know now thanks to those experiments, also really-empty spaces within those tubes. He may not have been the first to conduct these experiments (Torricelli and Galileo preceded him), reading the reports and discussions of the experiments, reveals Pascal's tenacity. 2 Therein he is not directly arguing in favour or against the philosophically problematic idea of empty space; relying on the impossible idea of a vacuum, he explains the phenomena observed. This eventually allows him to conclude that the lowering of liquids in a tube, turned upside down in a vessel containing the same liquid and producing the vacuum in the upper part of the tube, is entirely due to air pressure. Which is indeed, as Alexandre Koyré once put it, a remarkable way of explaining the real via the impossible 3 , that is via the counter-intuitive idea of a natural nothingness. Taking a leap from the scientific observations and calculations stemming from the early stages of Pascal's adult life, to the months preceding his premature death in 1662 at the 1 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer, London: Penguin 1966, 240. This English translation relies on Louis Lafuma's edition of the Pensées. Following a common practice in referring to Pensées, the number of the pensée will be added, according to the Lafuma, Léon Brunschvicg and Philippe Sellier editions, respectively. The motto above is taken from: Laf. 656 / Br. 368 / Sel. 743. 2 See Dominique Descotes, 'Pascal. Le calcul et la théologie', in: Pour la science, 16 (2003), 1-93. 3 Alexandre Koyré, Etudes d'histoire de la pensée scientifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 185-186.

"Un milieu entre rien et tout": The Self-alienation of the Human Consciousness in Pascal's Pensées

PUBLICATIONES UNIVERSITATIS MISKOLCINENSIS SECTIO PHILOSOPHICA, 2022

In 1918 towards the end of his life, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in a letter to Picasso: “What is there today that is newer, more modern, more denuded and more laden with riches than Pascal?” What was it about this seventeenth century physicist, mathematician, inventor, moralist and religious philosopher that elicited such soaring praise from a surrealist poet over 250 years after his death at the young age of thirty-nine? Although Pascal was without a doubt a scientist of formidable genius, it was not his scientific prowess which won him the greatest admiration among the creative minds of the early twentieth century, nor which continues to feed his buoyant reputation at the beginning of the twenty-first. It was rather his profound insights into the workings of the human consciousness, his understanding in an age of humanism emerging from the Renaissance, that humans are, “un milieu entre rien et tout”, a space between nothing and everything, capable of the highest highs and the lowest lows.