Pensées

by Blaise Pascal

Overview

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true, declared Pascal in his Penseés. The cure for this, he explained, is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623-1662) intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity, in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. While Pascal's untimely death prevented his completion of the work, these fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Penseés remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. Unabridged republication of the W. F. Trotter translation as published by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1958. Introduction by T. S. Eliot.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789391316969
Publisher:	Sanage Publishing House
Publication date:	10/29/2021
Pages:	346
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62) laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities. His inventions and discoveries, which included an early version of the calculator, promoted developments in geometry, physics, and computer science and influenced latter-day thinkers such as Newton and Leibniz.

Table of Contents

Introduction by T. S. Eliot
I. Thoughts on Mind and on Style
II. The Misery of Man Without God
III. Of the Necessity of the Wager
IV. Of the Means of Belief
V. Justice and the Reason of Effects
VI. The Philosophers
VII. Morality and Doctrine
VIII. The Fundamentals of the Christian Religion
IX. Perpetuity
X. Typology
XI. The Prophecies
XII. Proofs of Jesus Christ
XIII. The Miracles
XIV. Appendix: Polemical Fragments
Notes
Index