Work · Rationalism
Pensées
Fragments of an apology for Christianity: the wager, the heart, the thinking reed.
Introduction
At his death in 1662 Pascal left about a thousand notes for a planned apology for the Christian religion, some already sorted into bundles. Relatives and friends at Port-Royal published a selection in 1670, smoothing and arranging the text; later editors such as Léon Brunschvicg (1897) and Louis Lafuma (1951) tried to reconstruct Pascal’s own order, so the fragments are cited by different numbering systems. Among the best-known are the wager argument, the image of the human being as a “thinking reed”, the claim that “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”, and the line on the eternal silence of infinite spaces. The book is read as theology, philosophy and French literature.
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Connections
Builds on
- Essays1580 · Michel de Montaigne
Criticizes
- Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes
Criticized in
- Philosophical Letters (Letters on the English)1734 · Voltaire
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