Skip to content
- Right now, the syllabus has many rationalists. Pascal offers an alternative in which reason is not our only important faculty: we also have the Heart, pertaining to our feelings, which can provide us with information about the world.
- Pascal examples a new kind of pessimism: he holds that the root of all evil is society and idleness in the absence of God, which leads people to turn away from the truth. He cynicism drives him to leave the world of men and take refuge in Port-Royal, where he can philosophize in peace. This marks a contrast with the Enlightenment thinkers, who believed was the means through which we might improve our minds and reason and become better through intellectual debate and philosophical discovery.
- Feeling moody? Pascal’s got some great depressing reads. My favorite is about how we can never truly know ourselves, so obviously we can’t fully know anyone else, so all human love is fake and meaningless. (But God can help!)
- Pascal’s religion of choice, Jansenism, believed in predestination. Most people nowadays are pretty attached to free will, so consider checking out why you should accept Pascal’s Wager and believe in God to ensure yourself the best in your already-determined fate.
- Voltaire disagreed with Pascal so much that he brought his major work, the Pensées, back into philosophical discussion in the 18th century, just so people could understand how wrong Pascal was. Pascal must have had some pretty sizeable ideas to get Voltaire worked up enough to re-establish his legacy, so you should give him a read!