Later, in Paris, the family hired a maid named Louise Delfault, who became effectively a member of the close-knit family. Pascal's father was an accomplished mathematician, and he provided the only formal education that his son enjoyed. As Carraud Chapter 2 shows, this arrangement was unique in the seventeenth century for a young man of Pascal's social status.
He was never trained in theology or the philosophy of the schools, and his exclusively domestic education focused initially on classical languages and mathematics. The decision to educate Pascal at home was motivated by the fact that he suffered from very poor health for most of his life, beginning at the age of two. Although his sister, Gilberte, may have exaggerated in her hagiographical biography, La vie de M.
He continued to be so ill that, at the age of twenty-four, he could tolerate no food other than in liquid form, which his sisters or his nurse warmed and fed to him drop by drop Vie : I, Gilberte's biography also confirms that, as his sisters matured, they assumed many of the nursing responsibilities for their infirm brother that would otherwise have been provided by his mother had she not died prematurely. The Pascal family moved residence frequently, for political and financial reasons.
France had declared war on Spain in , and this intermittent campaign lasted for most of Blaise Pascal's life. The international and local political context in which Pascal lived, together with very public disputes between competing religious and theological traditions in which he participated, helped determine the issues to which he contributed philosophical comments in the s and s.
For example, following the revolt of the Nu-Pieds in Normandy in July , Pascal's father was awarded a new post as a tax collector in Rouen, to which he moved in ; his son, Blaise, followed in While still in Paris, he had written the short Essai pour les coniques and, despite his youth, had been introduced to the Mersenne circle by his father as a promising young mathematician.
Later at Rouen he developed the first prototype of his calculating machine , and began to experiment with mercury barometers. Pascal's introduction to barometric experiments occurred by chance when the royal engineer, Pierre Petit — , passed through Rouen in September and informed both Pascals, father and son, about Evangelista Torricelli's experiments in Italy. He left one at the bottom of the mountain, and charged a local friar to keep watch during the day and note any changes in the height of the mercury.
As expected, the height of the mercury column varied inversely with the height above sea-level at which the measurements were taken. When the experimenters rejoined the friar at the bottom of the mountain and compared the measurements on both tubes, they concurred exactly.
Pascal concluded, mistakenly, that the experiment guaranteed his interpretation of its results [see below, Section 4]. Pascal's initial encounter with Jansenism had occurred when he was twenty-two years old. His father slipped on ice and dislocated or broke his thigh in January Following the accident, the Deschamps brothers, who had bone-setting and nursing skills, came to live in the Pascal household at Rouen for three months. Jansen recommended that Christians should turn aside from the pride and concupiscence of human knowledge and scientific investigations, and that they should concentrate exclusively on knowledge of God.
While this encounter with Jansenist theology is sometimes described as Pascal's first conversion, it is unlikely that he had already made the definitive choice about the insignificance of mathematical and scientific work that characterised his change of heart in the s. He returned to Paris with his sister, Jacqueline, in The return to Paris was followed within a few years by a radical change in the emotional and nursing support that Blaise Pascal had enjoyed since his earliest years.
However, his younger sister, Jacqueline, who had continued to act as his personal assistant, expressed a desire, in May , to become a nun. She wanted to enter the Port-Royal convent in Paris, which was under the spiritual supervision of Jansenists and in which one of Arnauld's sisters was a prominent Abbess. However, four months after her father's death in , and despite her brother's opposition, Jacqueline Pascal joined Port-Royal.
Then, for the first time in his life, Blaise Pascal was alone and still in poor health. He soon began to accept spiritual guidance from his sister Jacqueline and subsequently from a prominent Jansenist, Antoine Singlin — In the summer of , Pascal returned briefly to mathematics in correspondence with Pierre Fermat —65 about calculating probabilities associated with gambling.
In fact, as Edwards explains Hammond, Chapter 3 , Pascal's contribution to probability theory was not recognised until it was used by Bernoulli in the early eighteenth century. During the night of 23 November , Pascal had a dreamlike or ecstatic experience which he interpreted as a religious conversion.
He wrote a summary of the experience in a brief document entitled the Memorial , which he sewed into his coat and carried with him until his death eight years later. The intensity of this experience resulted in a definitive change in Pascal's lifestyle, in his intellectual interests, and in his personal ambitions. After , he terminated the mathematical discussions about which he had correspondended with Fermat, and he cancelled plans to publish a booklet on the vacuum that was ready to go into print.
Pascal had entered the final period of his life, which was dominated by religious controversy, continual illness, and loneliness. 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, Augustinus , Arnauld was threatened with censure by the Theology Faculty at the Sorbonne.
This provoked Pascal to write a series of open letters, between January and March , which 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 decide what he considered to be a matter of fact, and to what he perceived as the undue influence of a lax, secular 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 their influence in Rome and their political connections with the monarchy in France for Arnauld's censure. The final years of Pascal's life were devoted to religious controversy, to the extent that his increasingly poor health permitted. During this period, he began to collect ideas and to draft notes for a book in defence of the Catholic faith. While his health and premature death partly explain his failure to realise that ambition, one might also suspect that an inherent contradiction in the project's design would have made its implementation impossible.
Apologetic treatises in support of Christianity traditionally used reasons to support religious faith e. Pascal had collected his notes into bundles or liasses before he died, and had provided tentative titles for each bundle; however, these notes gave no indication of the order in which they should be read, either within a given bundle or even between various bundles, and subsequent editors failed to agree on any numbering system for the posthumously published notes.
They are reliably attributed to Pascal only when he expressed similar views elsewhere. Cole , Chapter 15 argues that Pascal exhibited signs of manic depression and an almost infantile dependence on his family in his mature years. In addition, many of the reported details of his personal life suggest a fundamentalist interpretation of religious belief that is difficult to reconcile with the critical reflection that defines philosophy as a discipline. For example, his sister's Life recorded that Pascal had an almost obsessive repugnance to any expression of emotional attachment, which Gilberte attributed to his high regard for the virtue of modesty.
Pascal believed uncritically that God performs miracles, among which he included the occasion when his niece was cured of a serious eye condition and the cure was attributed to what was believed to be a thorn from the passion of Christ.
In general, Pascal's commitment to Jansenism was unqualified, although he denied in the Provincial Letters that he was a member of Port-Royal I, Everything we know about Pascal during his maturity points to a single-minded, unwavering belief in the exclusive truth of a radical theological position that left no room for alternative religious perspectives, either within Christianity or outside it. This is not to suggest that it is impossible 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 all questions during the final ten years of his life almost exclusively from the perspective of his religious faith. He wrote a series of pamphlets that were supposed to look like letters between two friends, one in the city and one in the country or provinces. They came to be known as The Provincial Letters and poked fun at the Jesuits.
They were very popular. The Jesuits tried without success to find the author. The wit, reason, eloquence, and humor of the letters made the Jesuits a laughingstock object of ridicule. This was an apology, or defense, for Christianity. It was published eight years later by the Port Royal community in a thoroughly garbled and incoherent form. A reasonably authentic version first appeared in It deals with the great problems of Christian thought, faith versus reason, and free will.
The Letters give Pascal a place in literary history as the first of several great French writers practicing polite irony humor in which words are used to mean the opposite of their true meaning and satire making fun of human faults and weakness. In them, reason is supposedly made to take second place to religion.
Both books, however, are recognized as being among the great volumes in the history of religious thought. Little is known of Pascal's personal life after his entry into Port Royal. Some of Pascal's scientific and mathematical works were not published until after his death. His "Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids," and his work on the links between theories involving liquids and gases, were enormously important in providing knowledge to develop air compressors, vacuum pumps, and hydraulic run by the pressure created by forcing liquid through a small opening elevators.
Although he never wrote at great length on mathematics after entering Port Royal, the many short pieces that do survive are almost always concise and incisive. The mathematical theory of probability whether something is more likely to happen or not made its first great step forward when Pascal and Pierre de Fermat — began writing to one another.
They found that they both had come to similar conclusions independently. Pascal planned a treatise a formal explanation of a theory on the subject, but again only a fragment survived. It was published after his death. Pascal suffered increasingly from head pains after He died on August 19, Pascal published many of his theorems without providing proofs as a challenge to other mathematicians. Solutions were found by some of the best mathematicians of the time, all rising to do their best by Pascal's leadership.
The Confessions , with its focus on the self and personal identity, and especially on the self as a cumulative record, inscribed in memory, of our life-altering decisions and events, is conceivably the first existentialist text. That human life without God is wretched and that the human condition is marked by restlessness, ennui, and anxiety is an observation common to all three writers.
Another common feature of their work is the recurrent image of a vast gulf or abyss. Augustine compares the human soul to a deep abyss and likens it to the Nothingness preceding the Creation Genesis Without the light of God, he suggests, we are but a dark emptiness.
Kierkegaard argues that human freedom necessarily entails a constant sense of anxiety, and his image of our condition is that of a person standing on the edge of a dark precipice. In the Confessions Augustine describes the long ordeal that eventually leads to his conversion.
Instead, he must begin a new spiritual test and journey — that of actually living a Christian life. Similarly, Kierkegaard never wrote of being a Christian, but always of becoming one. He regarded an authentic Christian life as a constant trial and task. Like Augustine, Pascal places even harsher spiritual demands on himself after his conversion. And like Kierkegaard, he believes that true Christianity is an ever-striving imitatio Christi , a continual remaking of oneself in the image and spirit of Jesus.
It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it. For some reason Eliot assumed that our knowledge of Pascal was basically complete eighty years ago and that modern scholarship would do little to alter or augment our understanding of his life and work. On this point he was quite mistaken.
He remains a fixed point against which we are challenged to measure the sincerity and durability of our own values and beliefs. Krailsheimer has remarked that what we find when we read Pascal is actually something that we discover about ourselves In effect, what both Krailsheimer and Eliot are suggesting is that ultimately there is not one Pascal, but many — possibly as many as there are readers of his texts. In addition, every modern system of intra-urban or inter-urban shuttle transportation also owes a debt to the philosopher, who first conceived such a system and oversaw its original implementation in the city of Paris.
His combination of wit, irony, and aphorism, his ease and clarity, his air of someone skilled both in urbane conversation and erudite technical debate was to a large extent already present and on dazzling display in Montaigne. The same features reappear in the writings of Voltaire and the philosophes.
And today, thanks largely to Pascal, these attributes have become a part of French literary tradition. Pater rightly called him the intellectual equivalent of lightning.
David Simpson Email: dsimpson depaul. Blaise Pascal — Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, inventor, and theologian.
Deum meum et Deum vestrum. Ton Dieu sera mon Dieu. Final Years After his conversion Pascal formally renounced, but did not totally abandon, his scientific and mathematical studies. During the period , under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte, he produced a series of 18 public letters attacking the Jesuits and defending Arnauld and Jansenist doctrine.
Literary and Religious Works a. The five propositions can be stated as follows: 1. It is heresy to say that we can either accept grace or resist it. Christ did not die for everyone, but only for the elect. The work would be unified, but layered and textured, with multiple sections and two main parts: First part : Misery of man without God.
Second part : Happiness of man with God. Proved by nature itself. Between Misery and Grandeur In effect diversions prevent us from acknowledging our essential misery. Mathematical and Scientific Works a. Conic Sections Pascal made his first important mathematical discovery and published his first article, the Essay on Conics , at the age of sixteen. Experiments on the Vacuum In the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli, testing a hypothesis suggested by Galileo, took a glass tube closed at one end and filled it with mercury.
Although the idea of infinity can fill the imagination with dread, it can also, as Pascal points out at the conclusion of his treatise Of the Geometrical Spirit , provide us with a true understanding of nature and of our place in it: But those who clearly perceive these truths will be able to admire the grandeur and power of nature in this double infinity that surrounds us on all sides, and to learn by this marvelous consideration to know themselves, in regarding themselves thus placed between an infinitude and a negation of extension, between an infinitude and a negation of number, between an infinitude and a negation of movement, between an infinitude and a negation of time.
Figure 3: Cycloid Imagine a point P on the circumference of a revolving circle. Philosophy of Science and Theory of Knowledge a. Philosophy of Science Of the many great natural philosophers of the 17 th century — a group that includes both theoreticians and experimentalists and such illustrious names as Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Boyle, Huygens, and Gassendi — Pascal arguably was the one who came closest to articulating a coherent, comprehensive, durable philosophy of science consistent with and comparable to the standard view that prevails today, except that he came up short.
Theory of Knowledge Que-sais-je? Reason and Sense In a perfect world human reason would be percent reliable and hold sway. Fideism Fideism can be defined as the view that religious truth is ascertainable by faith alone and that faith is separate from, superior to, and generally antagonistic towards reason.
References and Further Reading a. George Pearce, tr. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, Mesnard, Jean, ed. Paris: Seuill, Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts, Letters, and Opuscules.
Wright, tr. New York: Hurd and Houghton, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Roger Ariew, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. AJ Krailsheimer, trans. New York: Penguin Books, Honor Levi, trans. Anthony Levi, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, Phillipe Sellier and G. Ferryrolles, eds. Paris: Auguste Vaton, Elibron Classics replica edition, Biographical and critical studies Bishop, Morris.
Pascal: The Life of Genius. Bloom, Harold, ed. Blaise Pascal: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, Borges, Jorge Luis. Boyle, Robert. Oxford: William Hall, Cobb, William Frederick. Selbie, eds. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Part Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, Cousin, Victor. Paris, Didier, Digitized by Google Books. Davidson, Hugh M. Blaise Pascal. Boston: Twayne, Edward, AWF. Eliot, T. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, ; Faugere, Prosper. Paris, Goldmann, Lucien.
Philip Thody. Brill, Guardini, Romano. Pascal for Our Time. New York: Herder and Herder, Hammond, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Pascal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, James, William. Walter Kaufmann, ed. Jones, Matthew. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Kearns, Edward John. Ideas in Seventeenth-Century France.
Krailsheimer, A. New York: Hill and Wang, Melzer, Sara E. Berkeley: University of California Press, Mesnard, Jean. Claude and Marcia Abraham, tr. Pascal: His Life and Works. London: Harvill Press, Mill, J. London: Longmans, Green, and Company, Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo.
Walter Kaufmann, tr. New York: Vintage Books, La vie de M. Paris: Lettres Moderne, Peters, James R. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. London: Gibbings and Company Limited, , pp. Sartre, Jean-Paul. New York: Philosophical Library, Sellier, Phillipe. Pascal et Saint Augustin. Paris: A. Colin, Vainio, Olli-Pekka. Beyond Fideism: Negotiable Religious Identities. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Philosophical Letters. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Wallace, David Foster.
New York: WW Norton, Wetsel, David. Wood, William. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Author Information David Simpson Email: dsimpson depaul. Until , Pascal worked on improvements to the machine, which was called the Pascaline.
It resembled the mechanical calculators of the s. The French money system presented Pascal with many technological challenges, as there were, at the time, 20 sols in a livre and 12 deniers in a sol. This made his task much more difficult than it would have been if the system was based on factors of Nevertheless, he was able to construct a machine that was reasonably accurate.
The Pascaline could only add and subtract; multiplication and division were done using a series of additions and subtractions. The machine had eight movable dials that added up to eight figured long sums.