Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor and Christian philosopher. Educated at home by his father, he wrote an essay on conic sections at sixteen, and at about nineteen he built one of the first mechanical calculators, the Pascaline, to ease his father's work as a tax official. He investigated vacuums and atmospheric pressure and formulated the principle of pressure transmission in confined fluids; his correspondence with Pierre de Fermat in 1654 helped lay the foundations of probability theory. The turning point came on the night of November 23, 1654, when an intense religious experience, recorded in a note he kept sewn into his coat, turned his remaining years toward faith. His unfinished defense of Christianity, published after his death as the Pensées, includes the reflection that “the heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” The unit of pressure, the pascal, honors his name.
Latest UpdatesLIVE
Western Philosophy from Augustine to Kant
Augustine of Hippo drew on Platonic philosophy to frame Christian thought, and Thomas Aquinas later united Christian theology with the philosophy of Aristotle. In the seventeenth century, René Descartes made methodical doubt the starting point of modern philosophy, Blaise Pascal explored the limits of reason, and John Locke grounded knowledge in experience. Immanuel Kant then sought to reconcile these rationalist and empiricist traditions.
31 followers
31 followers
133 followers
3 followers
133 followers
