Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who built a calculating machine at nineteen, settled the question of the vacuum against Descartes, and founded the theory of probability in a correspondence with Fermat about a gambling problem. On the night of 23 November 1654 he had the experience he recorded on a scrap of parchment sewn into his coat — FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars — and afterwards wrote in defence of Port-Royal and towards the apology for Christianity he did not live to finish.
Works (2)
- Pensees — The notes for an apology for the Christian religion that Pascal did not live to write, found after his death in 1662 in bundles pinned together and printed by Port-Royal eight years later. They are given here in Brunschvicg’s arrangement and W. F. Trotter’s translation, in the fourteen sections and under the numbering by which they are cited — the wager is 233, the thinking reed 347, and the heart with its reasons 277. (14 notes)
- The Provincial Letters — Eighteen letters written anonymously and published one at a time during the Sorbonne’s proceedings against Antoine Arnauld: the first three defend the Jansenists of Port-Royal, and the rest turn on the moral theology of the Jesuits — probabilism, directing the intention, mental reservation — largely by the method of quoting it. Pascal’s own apology for them is the shortest: I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had the time to make it shorter. (20 notes)