Pensees (Dover Philosophical Classics) - Softcover

Pascal, Blaise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486432556 ISBN 13: 9780486432557

Publisher: Dover Publications Inc., 2004

Synopsis

Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pensées ranks among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Pascal had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity but his untimely death prevented the work's completion. The fragments remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. Introduction by T. S. Eliot.

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Review

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."

About the Author

Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to 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. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he was one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator. He built 20 of these machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, 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. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dover Publications Inc.
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0486432556
• ISBN 13: 9780486432557
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320