Blackwell Reference Online

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If Blaise Pascal were applying for work at a modern university, his published writings would make him extremely interesting to the departments of physics, mathematics or theology, but probably not to philosophy. Why, then, does he merit a chapter in a guide to modern philosophy? There are two good reasons. The first is that philosophy, for good or for ill, is professionalized today in ways that past times would have regarded as narrow. Little more than a century ago philosophy was believed to include the whole range of what can be known without divine revelation. What we today call the natural sciences, for example, were then known as “natural philosophy,” so that Pascal's scientific and mathematical work would have made him a philosopher to his own contemporaries and to many generations thereafter. The same could be said for much of his theological writing. The second good reason for including Pascal among the philosophers is that he fits very well into the broad, popular understanding of philosophy that still reigns outside university. The popular attitude toward philosophers, it is true, has always been ambivalent. On the one hand they are figures of fun, often pictured as naive and impractical, like Thales who fell into a ditch while watching the stars. But it is equally true that ordinary people profess sincere admiration of the ones they call “true philosophers,” meaning those ... log in or subscribe to read full text