The life of blaise pascal

However, even in such assessments, the criterion applied by Pascal remained narrowly and theologically focused on the extent to which political arrangements facilitated citizens in the performance of their primary duties to God. The appropriate attitude of subjects or citizens to established political authorities that govern them was exemplified, acutely, in the demand by the civil powers in Paris that even conscientiously objecting Jansenists had to sign and obey the formulary which condemned the five propositions allegedly found in Jansen's work.

Dissenters like Pascal were not required to assent, in conscience, to what they did not believe; but they were required to assent in their behaviour, and to obey their political and ecclesiastical superiors. Likewise, the subjects of Pascal's polity were not required to esteem their political masters, nor to hold beliefs about them as human beings which they did not believe were true.

It was enough that they obey them, that they observe the laws in their behaviour, and that they offer them the public deference that was appropriate to their status as God's representatives, worthy or otherwise, on earth. While it would be anachronistic to describe Pascal as an existentialist, one of the most prominent features of his work is the philosophical reflection on the radical contingency of human affairs that emerges especially in the final years of his life.

He used these reflections to puncture the pride, arrogance, and self-love of those who thought of themselves as superior to the vicissitudes of human life. Oliver Cromwell provided a contemporary illustration by his fall from power as a result of a relatively trivial illness.

The life of blaise pascal: Blaise Pascal (19 June –

Even Rome was about to tremble beneath him. Many of Pascal's intuitions about the contingency of human existence were a commonplace in the period, especially among Calvinist theologians Rivet, They were inspired in part by a growing acceptance within cosmology of the infinite extent of the universe and, in contrast, the relative brevity of human lives.

They owed even more to a theological perspective that claimed to represent human affairs from God's perspective, including the absolute will by which He predestines individuals for salvation or eternal perdition. One could question the validity of considering the value of finite beings from the naturalistic perspective of an infinite universe, or even the conceivability of a divine perspective that, even according to Pascal, is not naturally accessible to finite minds.

Pascal's rejection of any naturalistic explanation of the human mind or soul, his emphasis on dread of an unknown future because, according to his theology, we do not know whether we are saved or damnedthe apparent insignificance of human existence, and the experience of being dominated by political and natural forces that far exceed our limited powers, strike a chord of recognition with some of the existentialist writings that emerged in Europe following the Second World War.

This was philosophy in a different register. For that reason, some commentators reject the suggestion that Pascal was not a philosopher Brun, ; Hunter, Rather than speculate about matters that transcend the limited capacity of the human intellect, Pascal invites his readers to recognize the description of his personal experiences as resonating with their own.

While emphasizing the natural insignificance of individual human lives, he did not conclude that human existence was absurd. He pointed instead, as Christian existentialists have done since, to a source of meaning that would transcend the limitations of our thought. Access, however, was strictly limited to those to whom God freely gave the gift of religious faith, without any merit on the part of the recipient.

Life and Works 2. Nature and Grace 3. Free Will 4. Theory of Knowledge 5. Ethics and Politics 6. Nature and Grace Pascal's philosophical reflections are dominated by a theological interpretation of the human condition that he claimed to have borrowed from Saint Augustine. Free Will How to reconcile the complementary agency of God and of natural causes was a central metaphysical problem for those, in the the life of blaise pascal century, who accepted divine intervention in the natural world.

Human beings, by their own nature, always have the power to sin and to resist grace, and since the time of their corruption they always have an unfortunate depth of concupiscence which infinitely increases this power of resistance. Nevertheless, when it pleases God to touch them with his mercy, He makes them do what he wants them to do and in the manner in which he wishes them to act, without this infallibility of God's operation destroying in any way the natural freedom of human beings … That is how God disposes the free will of human beings without imposing any necessity on them, and how free will, which can always resist grace but does not always wish to do so, directs itself both freely and infallibly towards God.

Theory of Knowledge Pascal did not publish an explicit theory of knowledge or philosophy of science in any single text. Pascal and Human Existence While it would be anachronistic to describe Pascal as an existentialist, one of the most prominent features of his work is the philosophical reflection on the radical contingency of human affairs that emerges especially in the final years of his life.

Lafuma ed. Mesnard ed. Le Guern ed. The Physical Treatises of PascalI. Spiers trans. Sellier ed. The Provincial LettersA. Krailsheimer trans. Levi trans. Related Early Works Arnauld, A. Lyon: Plaignard. Arnauld, A. Nicole, La Logique ou l'art de penser2 nd edn. Clair and F. Girbal eds. Logic or the Art of ThinkingJ. Buroker, trans.

King trans. Jansenius, C. AugustinusLouvain. La Forge, Louis de, Treatise on the Human MindD. Clarke trans. Recommended Secondary Literature Baird, A. Bove, L. Brun, Jean, La philosophie de PascalParis: Presses universitaires de France. Carraud, V. Pascal et la philosophieParis: Presses universitaires de France. Clarke, Desmond M. Pascal concluded with the proof.

In the same treatise, Pascal gave an explicit statement of the principle of mathematical induction. InPascal, while suffering from a toothache, began considering several problems concerning the cycloid. His toothache disappeared, and he took this as a heavenly sign to proceed with his research. Eight days later he had completed his essay [ 28 ] and, to publicize the results, proposed a contest.

Pascal proposed three questions relating to the center of gravityarea and volume of the cycloid, with the winner or winners to receive prizes of 20 and 40 Spanish doubloons. Wallis published Wren's proof crediting Wren in Wallis's Tractus Duogiving Wren priority for the first published proof.

The life of blaise pascal: Blaise Pascal was a

Pascal contributed to several fields in physics, most notably the fields of fluid mechanics and pressure. In honour of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure and Pascal's law an important principle of hydrostatics. He introduced a primitive form of roulette and the roulette wheel in his search for a perpetual motion machine.

His work in the fields of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics centered on the principles of hydraulic fluids. His inventions include the hydraulic press using hydraulic pressure to multiply force and the syringe. He proved that hydrostatic pressure depends not on the weight of the fluid but on the elevation difference. He demonstrated this principle by attaching a thin tube to a barrel full of water and filling the tube with water up to the level of the third floor of a building.

This caused the barrel to leak, in what became known as Pascal's barrel experiment. ByPascal had learned of Evangelista Torricelli 's experimentation with barometers. Having replicated an experiment that involved placing a tube filled with mercury upside down in a bowl of mercury, Pascal questioned what force kept some mercury in the tube and what filled the space above the mercury in the tube.

At the time, most scientists including Descartes believed in a plenum, i. Following more experimentation in this vein, in Pascal produced Experiences nouvelles touchant le vide "New experiments with the vacuum"which detailed basic rules describing to what degree various liquids could be supported by air pressure. It also provided reasons why it was indeed a vacuum above the column of liquid in a barometer tube.

The Torricellian vacuum found that air pressure is equal to the weight of 30 inches of mercury. If air has a finite weight, Earth's atmosphere must have a maximum height. Pascal reasoned that if true, air pressure on a high mountain must be less than at a lower altitude. The weather was chancy last Saturday Several important people of the city of Clermont had asked me to let them know when I would make the ascent I was delighted to have them with me in this great work First I poured 16 pounds of quicksilver I repeated the experiment two more times while standing in the same spot I attached one of the tubes to the vessel and marked the height of the quicksilver and Taking the other tube and a portion of the quick silver I repeated the experiment five times with care Pascal replicated the experiment in Paris by carrying a barometer up to the top of the bell tower at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucheriea height of about 50 metres.

The mercury dropped two lines. He found with both experiments that an ascent of 7 fathoms lowers the the life of blaise pascal by half a line. Blaise Pascal Chairs are given to outstanding international scientists to conduct their research in the Ile de France region. In the winter ofPascal's year-old father broke his hip when he slipped and fell on an icy street of Rouen; given the man's age and the state of medicine in the 17th century, a broken hip could be a very serious condition, perhaps even fatal.

Rouen was home to two of the finest doctors in France, Deslandes and de la Bouteillerie. The elder Pascal "would not let anyone other than these men attend him It was a good choice, for the old man survived and was able to walk again Both men were followers of Jean Guillebertproponent of a splinter group from Catholic teaching known as Jansenism.

This still fairly small sect was making surprising inroads into the French Catholic community at that time. It espoused rigorous Augustinism. Blaise spoke with the doctors frequently, and after their successful treatment of his father, borrowed from them works by Jansenist authors. In this period, Pascal experienced a sort of "first conversion" and began to write on theological subjects in the course of the following year.

Pascal fell away from this initial religious engagement and experienced a few years of what some biographers have called his "worldly period" — His father died in and left his inheritance to Pascal and his sister Jacqueline, for whom Pascal acted as conservator. Jacqueline announced that she would soon become a postulant in the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal.

Pascal was deeply affected and very sad, not because of her choice, but because of his chronic poor health; he needed her just as she had needed him. Suddenly there was war in the Pascal household. Blaise pleaded with Jacqueline not to leave, but she was adamant. He commanded her to stay, but that didn't work, either. At the heart of this was Blaise's fear of abandonment By the end of October ina truce had been reached between brother and sister.

In return for a healthy annual stipend, Jacqueline signed over her part of the inheritance to her brother. Gilberte had already been given her inheritance in the form of a dowry. In early January, Jacqueline left for Port-Royal. On that day, according to Gilberte concerning her brother, "He retired very sadly to his rooms without seeing Jacqueline, who was waiting in the little parlor For a while, Pascal pursued the life of a bachelor.

During visits to his sister at Port-Royal inhe displayed contempt for affairs of the world but was not drawn to God. On the 23 of November,between and at night, Pascal had an intense religious experience and immediately wrote a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. The story of a carriage accident as having led to the experience described in the Memorial is disputed by some scholars.

For the next four years, he regularly travelled between Port-Royal and Paris. It was at this point immediately after his conversion when he began writing his first major literary work on religion, the Provincial Letters. In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical Period and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose.

His use of satire and wit influenced later polemicists.

The life of blaise pascal: Blaise Pascal was a French

Beginning in —57, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistrya popular ethical method used by Catholic thinkers in the early modern period especially the Jesuitsand in particular Antonio Escobar. Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity and all sorts of sins. The letter series was published between and under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV.

The king ordered that the book be shredded and burnt in Inin the midst of the formulary controversythe Jansenist school at Port-Royal was condemned and closed down; those involved with the school had to sign a papal bull condemning the teachings of Jansen as heretical. Even Pope Alexander, while publicly opposing them, nonetheless was persuaded by Pascal's arguments.

Aside from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and vicious satire in his arguments made the letters ripe for public consumption, and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is in the Provincial Letters that Pascal made his oft-quoted apology for writing a long letter, as he had not had time to write a shorter one.

From Letter XVI, as translated by Thomas M'Crie: 'Reverend fathers, my letters were not wont either to be so prolix, or to follow so closely on one another. Want of time must plead my excuse for both of these faults. The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. He was a dualist following Descartes.

In terms of God, Descartes and Pascal disagreed. Pascal wrote that "I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God, but he couldn't avoid letting him put the world in motion; afterwards he didn't need God anymore". Humans "are in darkness and estranged from God" because "he has hidden Himself from their knowledge".

He cared above all about the philosophy of religion. Pascalian theology has grown out of his perspective that humans are, according to Wood, "born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects and so we find it easy to reject God continually and deceive ourselves about our own sinfulness". He was 39 years old. Pascal's inventions and discoveries have been instrumental to developments in the fields of geometry, physics and computer science, influencing 17th-century visionaries like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton.

During the 20th century, the Pascal Pa unit was named after the thinker in honor of his contributions to the understanding of atmospheric pressure and how it could be estimated in terms of weight. In the late s, Swiss computer scientist Nicklaus Wirth invented a computer language and insisted on naming it after Pascal. This was Wirth's way of memorializing Pascal's invention of the Pascaline, one of the earliest forms of the modern computer.

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Benjamin Banneker. Charles Babbage. Leonhard Euler. Ada Lovelace. Valerie Thomas. John Venn. Mary Jackson. Mystic Hexagram and Religious Conversion Etienne was impressed. Inventions and Discoveries Ininspired by the idea of making his father's job of calculating taxes easier, Pascal Pascal started work on a calculator dubbed the Pascaline.

This was also the period in which he assumed the challenge of defending Arnauld and, more generally, Jansenist theology in the Provincial Letters. Following the condemnation by Pope Innocent X May of five propositions about grace that were allegedly found in Jansen's posthumously published book, AugustinusArnauld was threatened with censure by the Theology Faculty at the Sorbonne.

This provoked Pascal into writing a series of open letters, between January and Marchwhich were published one by one under a pseudonym and became known as the Provincial Letters. They purported to inform someone living outside Paris in the provinces about the events that were newsworthy in theological debates at the Sorbonne and, more widely, in the Catholic Church in France.

The Letters rely on satire and ridicule as much as on logic or argument to persuade readers of the justice of Arnauld's cause and of the unsustainability of his critics' objections. However, despite Pascal's efforts, Arnauld was expelled from the Sorbonne February Those who lived at Port-Royal des Champs — another convent associated with Port-Royal, which was outside the city boundaries — agreed to leave voluntarily March under threat of forcible expulsion, and the convent was eventually razed to the ground.

The Provincial Letters are Pascal's deeply personal, angry response to the use of political power and church censure to address what he considered to be a matter of fact, and to what he perceived as the undue influence of a lax Jesuit morality on those who held political and ecclesiastical power in France. The Jesuits were not members of the Sorbonne and were not officially involved in Arnauld's censure; it is not immediately clear, therefore, why Pascal, in the course of writing the letters, devoted so much energy to criticizing the Jesuits.

He may have blamed Arnauld's fate on the Jesuits' influence in Rome and their political connections with the monarchy in France. The final years of Pascal's life were devoted to religious controversy, insofar as his increasingly poor health permitted. During this period, he began to collect and draft ideas for a book in defence of the Catholic faith.

While his health and premature death partly explain his failure to complete this work, one might also suspect that an inherent contradiction in the project would have made the task impossible. Apologetic treatises in support of Christianity traditionally required the author to provide reasons for religious faith; however, according to Pascal's radical theological position, it was impossible in principle to acquire or support genuine religious faith by reason, because genuine religious faith was a pure gift from God.

Having collected ideas for some time, Pascal began the task of cutting and pasting his draft notes into a coherent form before he died; however, he left the manuscript in such a condition that subsequent editors failed to agree on any numbering system or on the order, if any, in which they should be read. They are reliably used only when Pascal expressed similar views elsewhere.

ColeChapter 15 argues that Pascal exhibited signs of manic depression and an almost infantile the life of blaise pascal on his family in his mature years. In addition, many of the reported details of his personal life suggest a kind of fundamentalism about religious belief that is difficult to reconcile with what is taken today as the critical stance that defines philosophy as a discipline.

For example, if his sister's Life is accurate, Pascal seems to have had an almost obsessive repugnance for any expressions of emotional attachment, which Gilberte attributed to his high regard for the virtue of modesty. Pascal believed that God performs miracles, among which he included the occasion when his niece was cured of a serious eye condition by what was believed to be a thorn from the passion of Christ.

Pascal's commitment to Jansenism was unqualified, although he denied in the Provincial Letters that he was ever a member of Port-Royal I, Everything we know about Pascal during his maturity point to a single-minded, unwavering belief in the exclusive truth of a radical theological position that left almost no room for toleration of alternative religious perspectives.

This is not to suggest that it is the life of blaise pascal to be a religious believer and a philosopher; there are too many obvious counterexamples to such a suggestion. However, the intensity of Pascal's religious faith, following his conversion, seems to have made philosophical inquiries irrelevant to him, with the result that he approached questions during the final ten years of his life almost exclusively from the perspective of his religious faith.

There is a complementary reason for urging caution about reading Pascal as a philosopher. He wrote much but published little, none of it philosophy in the sense in which that term is used today. Apart from his brief essays on the vacuum and the Provincial Lettersall his writings were edited and amended posthumously by collaborators who were still involved in the theological controversies that had dominated Pascal's later life.

For example, he seems to have contributed to an early version of the Port-Royal Logic Arnauld and Nicole, that was subsequently published in ; and the Entretien avec M. Thus philosophical opinions that were attributed to him in various draft writings should be read with caution, and should be understood with reference to the context in which they were published by others apart from the author.

The life of blaise pascal: Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher,

This may also testify to the extreme ill-health and loneliness he experienced in his final years, when he reported that he could find consolation for his misery only in religion. Pascal was never employed in any capacity, and lived modestly from the financial support provided by his family. His younger sister, Jacqueline, had predeceased him at the Port-Royal convent in October Pascal's philosophical reflections are dominated by a theological interpretation of the human condition, following Adam's Fall from grace, that he claimed to have borrowed from Saint Augustine.

On this view, human nature is essentially corrupt, and there is no possibility of recovery by natural means or human effort. This theological perspective determined Pascal's views about human freedom, and about ethics and politics; it also set extra-philosophical limits to his theory of knowledge, and prompted the negative assessment adopted during the final years of his life about the relative worthlessness of scientific or mathematical research.

Following Augustine, Pascal emphasized the extent to which any recovery from the fallen state of human nature was a gift from God, one that was not earned or deserved in any way by human agents. This divine gift included, as one of its elements, religious faith itself, the capacity of humans to believe the theological interpretation on which the implied worldview depended.

Other commentators on Christian belief in the seventeenth century, such as John Locke or John Toland, presupposed that what a Christian is invited to believe must be intelligible, so that faith merely compensated for a lack of evidence in support of a particular proposition and made it possible for a Christian to accept it as true.

For these philosophers of religion, there were no mysteries in Christianity if that term included propositions that we cannot understand. For Pascal, however, faith provides appropriately disposed Christians with a means to transcend the limits of what is intelligible and to accept as true even matters that we cannot understand. To claim otherwise would be to set limits to the reality of God and to reduce religious faith to the compass of human understanding.

Thus those who are given the gift of genuine religious faith are expected not only to accept things that are uncertain but, especially, to accede to realities that are incomprehensible. Pascal offered no explanation of how this was possible. This degree of incomprehensibility in the content of religious belief would have been consistent with a corresponding relativism about the competing claims of different religious traditions.

For example, each tradition might have been presented as an alternative perspective on the transcendent. However, Pascal was as committed to the exclusive truth of Catholicism, and even to his preferred interpretation of that tradition, as he was open to belief in mysteries. Each one wishes to be believed on the basis of its own authority and threatens unbelievers.