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Sunday, October 18, 2009

"Pensees" by Blaise Pascal

..
or "Apologie de la Religion Catholique"
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There are two essential religious truths :
there is a God,
and there is a corruption of nature which makes men unworthly of him.
..
Reason is a little use in showing either the existence or the nature of God,
but it does reveal men's finiteness and his separation from God.
..
It is a reasonable wager to stake everything on God's existence,
for God either exists or he does not ;
if God is,then the man who believes in him wins everything,
while if God is not,the man who believes in him suffers only a finite loss.
..
In knowing that he is miserable,man achieves greatness.
..
Since man's will is subject to his passions,
it is important for men to obey custom simply because it is custom,
and to obey the law in order to avoid sedition and rebelion.
..
Blaise Pascal (French pronunciation: [blɛz paskal]), (June 19, 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, France – August 19, 1662, in Paris) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a civil servant. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the construction of mechanical calculators, the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
Pascal was a mathematician of the first order. He helped create two major new areas of research. He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. His results caused many disputes before being accepted.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism.[1] His father died in 1651. Following a mystical experience in late 1654, he had his "second conversion", abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In this year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetic of triangles. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids.
Pascal had poor health throughout his life and his death came just two months after his 39th birthday.[2]
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