Pascal did not publish any philosophical works during his relativelybrief lifetime. His status in French literature today is basedprimarily on the posthumous publication of a notebook in which hedrafted or recorded ideas for a planned defence of Christianity, thePensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autressujets (1670). Nonetheless, his philosophical commitments can be gleaned fromhis contributions to scientific and theological debates inFrance in the mid-seventeenth century.

• 1. Life and Works
• 2. Nature and Grace
• 3. Free Will
• 4. Theory of Knowledge
• 5. Ethics and Politics
• 6. Pascal and Human Existence
• Bibliography
  • Pascal's Works
  • Related Early Works
  • Recommended Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life and Works

Pascal was born in Clermont (now Clermont-Ferrand), France, on 19 June 1623, and diedthirty-nine years later in Paris (19 August 1662). Following hismother's death when he was three years old, Blaise was reared by hisfather, Étienne, in the company of his two sisters, Gilberte(b. 1620) and Jacqueline (b. 1625). Later, in Paris, the family hireda maid named Louise Delfault, who became effectively a member of theclose-knit family. Pascal's father was an accomplished mathematician,and he provided the only formal education that his son enjoyed. AsCarraud (1992: Chapter 2) shows, this arrangement was unique in theseventeenth century for a young man of Pascal's social status. He wasnever trained in theology or the philosophy of the schools, and hisexclusively domestic education focused initially on classicallanguages and mathematics. The decision to educate Pascal at home wasmotivated by the fact that he suffered from very poor health for mostof his life, beginning at the age of two. Although his sister,Gilberte, may have exaggerated in her hagiographical biography,Lavie de M. Pascal, she reported Pascal as claiming that“from the age of eighteen, he never passed a day withoutpain” (I, 67: all references to Pascal's works are to Pascal,1998/2000, with volume and page number). He continued to be so illthat, at the age of twenty-four, he could tolerate no food other thanin liquid form, which his sisters or his nurse warmed and fed to himdrop by drop (Vie: I, 69). Gilberte's biography alsoconfirms that, as his sisters matured, they assumed many of thenursing responsibilities for their infirm brother that would otherwisehave been provided by his mother had she not died prematurely.

The Pascal family moved residence frequently, for political andfinancial reasons. They transferred initially to Paris in November1631, although Étienne was forced to return seven years later tohis original home in what had meantime become Clermont-Ferrand, because heexpressed public dissent about the crown's fiscal policies.France had declared war on Spain in 1635, and thisintermittent campaign lasted for most of Blaise Pascal's life.The international and local political context in which Pascal lived, togetherwith very public disputes between competing religious and theologicaltraditions in which he participated, helped determine the issues towhich he contributed philosophical comments in the 1640s and 1650s.For example, following the revolt of the Nu-Pieds in Normandy in July 1639,Pascal's father was awarded a new post as a tax collector inRouen, to which he moved in 1639; his son, Blaise, followed in 1640. While stillin Paris, he had written the shortEssai pour les coniques(1640) and, despite his youth, had been introduced to the Mersenne circle byhis father as a promising young mathematician. Later at Rouen he developedthe first prototype of his calculating machine (1645), and began toexperiment with mercury barometers. Pascal's introduction tobarometric experiments occurred by chance when the royal engineer,Pierre Petit (1598–1667), passed through Rouen in September 1646and informed both Pascals, father and son, about Evangelista Torricelli'sexperiments in Italy. Pascal performed experiments with mercurybarometers initially in Rouen and Paris, and publishedExpériences nouvelles touchant la vide in 1647. Sincehe was too ill to do so himself, he arranged for his brother-in-law,Florin Périer, to conduct on his behalf one of the most famousexperiments of the scientific revolution on the puy-de-Dôme, inthe Auvergne.

Périer arranged for two similar barometric tubes to befilled with mercury, on 19 September 1648. He left one at the bottom ofthe mountain, and charged a local friar to keep watch during the dayand note any changes in the height of the mercury. Together with otherwitnesses, Périer climbed the mountain and took readings of theheight of the mercury on the mountain top, and subsequently at twointermediate places on their return journey down the mountainside. Asexpected, the height of the mercury column varied inversely with the height(above sea-level) at which the measurements were taken. When theexperimenters rejoined the friar at the bottom of the mountain andcompared the measurements on both tubes, they concurred exactly. Thefriar reported that, throughout the day, there had been no variation inthe height of the mercury column that he observed, “despite thefact that the weather was very changeable, sometimes calm, sometimesrainy, sometimes very foggy and sometimes windy” (I, 433).The results of this experiment were published asRécit de lagrande expérience de l'équilibre des liqueurs(1648). Pascal concluded, mistakenly, that the experiment guaranteed hisinterpretation of its results [see below, Section 4].

Pascal's initial encounter with Jansenism had occurred when he wastwenty-two years old. His father slipped on ice and dislocated orbroke his thigh in January 1646. Following the accident, the Deschampsbrothers, who had bone-setting and nursing skills, came to live in thePascal household at Rouen for three months. They introduced the familyto the strict observance of Christianity inspired by the Dutchtheologian, Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), and the Frenchtheologian, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, who is more commonly known asthe Abbé de Saint-Cyran (1581–1643). The evangelical workof the Deschamps brothers relied partly on Jansen's short treatise,theDiscours sur la réformation le l'hommeintérieur, which was based on the text of I John 2:16:“For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the fleshand the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life, which is notof the Father but is of this world.” Jansen taught that a desirefor knowledge was one form of concupiscence, and he argued that fromthis “illness … arises the investigation of nature'ssecrets (which are irrelevant to us), knowledge of which is useless,and which men do not wish to know except for the sake of knowingthem” (Jansen 2004: 24). Jansen recommended that Christiansshould turn aside from the pride and concupiscence of human knowledgeand scientific investigations, and that they should concentrateexclusively on knowledge of God. While this encounter with Jansenisttheology is sometimes described as Pascal's first conversion, it isunlikely that he had already made the definitive choice about theinsignificance of mathematical and scientific work that characterisedhis change of heart in the 1650s. He returned to Paris with hissister, Jacqueline, in 1647. Descartes met him there, in September1647, during an extended trip to Paris from hisusual residence in the north of Holland, and discussed with Pascal theresults they might expect if they conducted the kind of experimentthat was subsequently performed on the puy-de-Dôme.

The Pascal family (Étienne, Blaise, and Jacqueline) left Parisagain during the civil war known as the Fronde (1648), and theyreturned later that year to a new address in the French capital. Thesettlement agreed by Mazarin and the regent withtheparlement to end the Fronde meant that Étienne hadbecome redundant as a tax-collector in Rouen. The return to Paris wasfollowed within a few years by a radical change in the emotional andnursing support that Blaise Pascal had enjoyed since his earliestyears. His older sister Gilberte had married Florin Périer inJune 1641 and had moved to Clermont-Ferrand. However, his youngersister, Jacqueline, who had continued to act as his personalassistant, expressed a desire, in May 1648, to become a nun. Shewanted to enter the Port-Royal convent in Paris, which was under thespiritual supervision of Jansenists and in which one of Arnauld'ssisters was a prominent Abbess. Étienne's opposition causedJacqueline to defer implementing her decision as long as he was stillalive. However, four months after her father's death in 1651, anddespite her brother's opposition, Jacqueline Pascal joinedPort-Royal. Then, for the first time in his life, Blaise Pascal wasalone and still in poor health. He soon began to accept spiritualguidance from his sister Jacqueline and subsequently from a prominentJansenist, Antoine Singlin (1607–64).

In the summer of 1654, Pascal returned briefly to mathematics incorrespondence with Pierre Fermat (1601–65) about calculatingprobabilities associated with gambling. He summarized his findings intheTraité du triangle arithmétique which, likemuch of his other work, remained unpublished until after his death. Infact, as Edwards explains (Hammond, 2003: Chapter 3), Pascal'scontribution to probability theory was not recognised until it wasused by Bernoulli in the early eighteenth century.

During the night of 23 November 1654, Pascal had a dreamlike orecstatic experience which he interpreted as a religious conversion. Hewrote a summary of the experience in a brief document entitledtheMemorial, which he sewed into his coat and carried withhim until his death eight years later. The intensity of thisexperience resulted in a definitive change in Pascal's lifestyle, inhis intellectual interests, and in his personal ambitions. After 1654,he terminated the mathematical discussions about which he hadcorrespondended with Fermat, and he cancelled plans to publish abooklet on the vacuum that was ready to go into print. This bookletappeared posthumously asTraités de l'équilibre desliqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l'air (1663), with anintroduction by Florin Périer. Périer may haveexaggerated the other-worldly attitude of his late brother-in-law,when he wrote that, for more than ten years before his death, Pascalwas aware of “the vanity and nothingness of all these types ofknowledge, and that he had acquired such disgust for them that hecould hardly tolerate intelligent people devoting their time to themand speaking seriously about them” (I, 459). Pascal had enteredthe final period of his life, which was dominated by religiouscontroversy, continual illness, and loneliness. This was also theperiod in which he assumed the challenge of defending Arnauld and,more generally, Jansenist theology in theProvincialLetters.

Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) was a prominent theologian in theSorbonne, who was most famous for his defence of Jansenism inDe lafréquente communion (1643). Following the condemnation byPope Innocent X (May 1653) of five propositions about grace that wereallegedly found in Jansen's posthumously published book,Augustinus (1640), Arnauld was threatened with censure by theTheology Faculty at the Sorbonne. This provoked Pascal to write aseries of open letters, between January 1656 and March 1657, which werepublished one by one under a pseudonym and became known as theProvincial Letters. They purported to inform someone livingoutside Paris (in the provinces) about the events that were newsworthyin theological debates at the Sorbonne and, more widely, in theCatholic Church in France. TheLetters rely on satire andridicule as much as on logic or argument to persuade readers of thejustice of Arnauld's cause and of the unsustainability of his critics'objections. However, despite Pascal's efforts, Arnauld was expelledfrom the Sorbonne (February 1656). Those who lived at Port-Royal desChamps — another convent associated with Port-Royal, which wasoutside the city boundaries — agreed to leave voluntarily (March1656) under threat of forcible expulsion, and the convent waseventually razed to the ground. TheProvincial Letters arePascal's deeply personal, angry response to the use of political powerand church censure to decide what he considered to be a matter offact, and to what he perceived as the undue influence of a lax,secular Jesuit morality on those who held political and ecclesiasticalpower in France. The Jesuits were not members of the Sorbonne and werenot officially involved in Arnauld's censure; it is not immediatelyclear, therefore, why Pascal, in the course of writing the letters,devoted so much energy to criticizing the Jesuits. He may have blamedtheir influence in Rome and their political connections with themonarchy in France for Arnauld's censure.

The final years of Pascal's life were devoted to religiouscontroversy, to the extent that his increasingly poor healthpermitted. During this period, he began to collect ideas and to draftnotes for a book in defence of the Catholic faith. While his healthand premature death partly explain his failure to realise thatambition, one might also suspect that an inherent contradiction in theproject's design would have made its implementationimpossible. Apologetic treatises in support of Christianitytraditionally used reasons to supportreligious faith (e.g. a proof of God's existence, or historicalarguments to show the credibility of witnesses whose evidence isreported in the New Testament); however, according to Pascal's radicaltheological position, it was impossible in principle to acquire orsupport genuine religious faith by reason, because genuine religiousfaith was a pure gift from God. Pascal had collected his notes intobundles orliasses before he died, and had provided tentativetitles for each bundle; however, these notes gave no indication of theorder in which they should be read, either within a given bundle oreven between various bundles, and subsequent editors failed to agreeon any numbering system for the posthumously published notes. The mostfrequently quoted modern editions ofthePensées—those of Lafuma, Sellier, or LeGuern—provide concordances to the numbering systems adopted byalternative editions. Given the status of thePenséesas a posthumously published notebook, it also remains unclear whetherPascal endorsed the opinions that are recorded there, or whether heplanned to use some of them merely for comment or critique. They arereliably attributed to Pascal only when he expressed similar viewselsewhere. One of the most famous and most extensive notes inthePensées (Fragment 397: II, 676–81) is theso-called ‘wager’ in favour of belief in God.

Cole (1995, Chapter 15) argues that Pascal exhibited signs of manicdepression and an almost infantile dependence on his family in hismature years. In addition, many of the reported details of hispersonal life suggest a fundamentalist interpretation of religiousbelief that is difficult to reconcile with the critical reflectionthat defines philosophy as a discipline. For example, hissister'sLife recorded that Pascal had an almost obsessiverepugnance to any expression of emotional attachment, which Gilberteattributed to his high regard for the virtue of modesty. She reportsthat “he could not even tolerate the caresses that I receivedfrom my own children” (I, 83). Pascal believed uncriticallythat God performs miracles, among which he included the occasion whenhis niece was cured of a serious eye condition and the cure wasattributed to what was believed to be a thorn from the passion ofChrist. In general, Pascal's commitment to Jansenism was unqualified,although he denied in theProvincial Letters that he was amember of Port-Royal (I, 781). Everything we know about Pascal duringhis maturity points to a single-minded, unwavering belief in theexclusive truth of a radical theological position that left noroom for alternative religious perspectives, eitherwithin Christianity or outside it. This is not to suggest that it isimpossible to be a religious believer and a philosopher; there are toomany obvious counterexamples to such a suggestion. However, theintensity of Pascal's religious faith, following his conversion, seemsto have made philosophical inquiries irrelevant to him, with theresult that he approached all questions during the final ten years ofhis life almost exclusively from the perspective of his religiousfaith. It was this perspective that predominated inthePensées.

There is a complementary reason for urging caution about readingPascal as a philosopher. He wrote much but published little, none ofwhich was philosophy in the sense in which that term is usedtoday [see section 6]. Apart from his brief essays on the vacuum andtheProvincial Letters, all his writings were edited andamended posthumously by collaborators who were still involved in thetheological controversies that had dominated Pascal's later life. Forexample, he seems to have contributed to an early version of thePort-Royal Logic (Arnauld and Nicole, 1993) that was subsequentlypublished in 1662; and theEntretien avec M. de Sacy was composed many years after hisdeath, based on the recollections of an editor. Thus philosophicalopinions that were attributed to him in various writings that he leftonly in draft versions should be read with caution, because they werepublished posthumously by partisan proponents of Jansenism rather thantheir original author. His apparent disenchantment with philosophicalstudies is reflected in Fragment 77 of thePensées:“we do not believe the whole of philosophy to be worth onehour's effort” (II, 566). This may also testify to the extremeill-health and loneliness he experienced in his final years, when hereported that he could find consolation for his misery only inreligion.

Pascal was never employed in any capacity, and he lived modestly withthe financial support provided by his family. He died in the care ofhis sister, Gilberte, and was buried in the church of SaintÉtienne du Mont, in Paris. His younger sister, Jacqueline, hadpredeceased him at the Port-Royal convent in October 1661.

2. Nature and Grace

Pascal's philosophical reflections are dominated by a theologicalinterpretation of the human condition that he claimed to have borrowedfrom Saint Augustine. On this view, Adam's fall from grace resulted ina human nature that is essentially corrupt, and there is nopossibility of recovery by natural means or human effort. Thistheological perspective determined Pascal's views about human freedom,and about ethics and politics; it also set extra-philosophical limitsto his theory of knowledge, and prompted the negative assessment thathe adopted, during the final years of his life, of the value ofscientific or mathematical research.

Following Augustine, Pascal emphasized the extent to which anyrecovery from the fallen state of human nature was a gift from God,which could not be earned or deserved in any way by human agents. Thisdivine gift included, as one of its elements, religious faith itself,that is, the capacity of humans to believe the theologicalinterpretation on which the implied worldview depended. Otherphilosophical commentators on Christian belief in the seventeenthcentury, such as John Locke or John Toland, argued that what aChristian is invited to believe must be intelligible; according tothem, there were no mysteries in Christianity if that term includespropositions that we cannot understand. Thus religious faith merelycompensated for a lack of evidence in support of a particularproposition, and made it possible for a Christian to accept it as true(Clarke, 2011). For Pascal, however, faith provides appropriatelydisposed Christians with a means to transcend the limits of what isintelligible and to accept as true even matters that they cannotunderstand. To claim otherwise would be to set limits to the realityof God and to reduce religious faith to the compass of humanunderstanding. ThePensées suggest: “if onesubmits everything to reason, our religion will contain nothing thatis mysterious or supernatural” (Fragment 162: II, 602). Thusthose who are given the gift of genuine religious faith are expectednot only to accept things that are uncertain but, especially, toaccede to realities that are incomprehensible. Pascal offered noexplanation of how this was possible.

This degree of incomprehensibility in the content of religious beliefis consistent with a corresponding relativism about the competingclaims of different religious traditions. For example, each religionor each Christian sect might be understood as an alternative andequally uncertain perspective on the transcendent. However, Pascal wasas committed to the exclusive truth of Catholicism, and even to hispreferred interpretation of that tradition, as he was unwavering inhis belief in mysteries. “I see several inconsistent religions,all of which except one are false. Each one wishes to be believed onthe basis of its own authority and threatens unbelievers. I thereforedo not believe them for that reason” (Fragment 184: II,608). For Pascal, the Roman Catholic Church was the only true church,“outside of which I am fully convinced there is nosalvation” (Provincial Letters: I, 781).

In contrast therefore with many of his contemporaries in France, suchas Descartes or Malebranche, Pascal also rejected the suggestion thatone could prove the existence of God by rational arguments. “Themetaphysical proofs … have little value” (Fragment 179:II, 605). A fortiori, he rejected the view adopted by Malebranche,that we have no basis for believing the alleged content of revelationunless we have a prior proof that there exists a God who is capable ofcommunicating with us. For Pascal, reason was completely inadequate tothe task of relating to a transcendent divinity, and the only way toGod was by ‘faith’.

Thus the discussion of wagering in favour of religious belief in thePensées (Fragment 397: II, 676–81), which Pascaldrafted and revised a number of times, was written from theperspective of someone who already believed in God, and who assumedthat their belief was itself a gift from God. Pascal had independentlystudied the mathematics of gambling, and while considering how tocompose an apology or defence of Christianity, he reviewed ways inwhich a committed Christian might adapt the logic of wagering to showthat their belief is not unreasonable. However, according to Pascal'sdeepest theological convictions, nothing that he wrote in this contextcould persuade an unbeliever to become a believer in any sense thatcould lead to salvation. No one can communicate religious faith inPascal's sense to others by reasoning or wagering, nor can such faithbe self-induced by the same methods. For Pascal, a decision to believeGod's revelation (in the relevant sense of ‘believe’) isnot based on rational calculation nor, as indicated above, does itpresuppose a philosophical argument in favour of God's existence. Acalculation of the probability of one's wager is logically posteriorto belief, and it purports to show only that those who have accepteddivine grace and believed in God have made a wager that is notunreasonable. Why? Because the significance or value of the belief asa means to eternal salvation would, if it were true, compensate forits relative implausibility.

The various kinds of divine assistance (or, in the language oftheology, grace) by which human beings may overcome their Fallencondition were the subject of intense theological controversy in theseventeenth century. The Church had condemned as heretical thePelagian theory that human beings could achieve eternal salvation bythe use of their unaided, natural powers. Various opinions to theeffect that they could make some independent contribution to thisprocess were equally condemned as semi-Pelagian. These suggestionswere thought to deny or mitigate the exclusive efficacy of theIncarnation. Jansenism represented a starkly exclusive interpretationof how God's assistance enabled Fallen human beings to recover fromthe effect of Original Sin by the influence of ‘efficaciousgrace’. However, such a unilateral interpretation of God'sintervention seemed to make human effort redundant. Pascal mocked thesuggestion that God assisted weak human beings by means of a‘sufficient grace’ which was not sufficient, and that thisinsufficient grace required an independent contribution from humanagents. “By sufficient grace you mean a grace that is notsufficient” (Provincial Letters: I, 601). In responseto what he understood as various degrees of Pelagianism, Pascaldefended the theory that no human effort couldcontribute to salvation, even as a partial cause, and that God's agency iscompletely efficacious if He chooses freely to assist undeservingsinners.

This controversy about the relative efficacy of God's gracewas most evident in the discussion of free will, and in Pascal'saccount of how we come to know the truth about radically differentkinds of reality, the natural and the supernatural.

3. Free Will

How to reconcile the complementary agency of God and of natural causeswas a central metaphysical problem for those, in the seventeenthcentury, who accepted divine intervention in the natural world. One ofthe solutions offered (for example, by Malebranche and La Forge) wasoccasionalism, which resulted in part from a recognition of God'somnipotence. Unless God's causality were understood as inadequatelyefficacious, occasionalists thought it was redundant to require asupplementary causal activity on the part of natural phenomena orhuman agents in order to cause the effects that are attributed both tothem and to God's agency. Pascal's account of free will reflected thisdilemma at the heart of human choice. His discussion owes much to thatof Augustine (2010),On Free Choice.

Pascal was little concerned about the freedom of human choices thatresult, for example, in deciding to read one book rather than another,or in analyses of what it means to claim that an agent could havechosen or done otherwise. The comprehensive concupiscence under whichhuman nature struggled, according to Pascal's account of the Fall,implied that what are usually called human ‘choices’ aredetermined by the dominant desires of each individual. That provided anaturalistic theory of mundane human choices. The less mundane cases,which were the focus of Pascal's interest, include those where someone‘chooses’ to act morally or otherwise. According to theJansenist theory of grace, God intervenes in the lives of individualsand makes it possible for them to choose something that otherwise theycould not have chosen, namely, to act in a manner that is conducive tosalvation. If God's assistance is sufficient to guarantee the efficacyof a human choice, it would seem that the choice of a human agent isdetermined by God's greater power. On the other hand, if God's gracewere inefficacious, it would seem as if He provides inadequateassistance because He relies on natural human powers to exercise freewill and thereby to supply what is missing from divine grace. Thislatter position was rejected by Pascal as heretical andsemi-Pelagian.

Pascal's solution was to endorse an interpretation of Augustine'stheory of grace, and to re-describe as ‘free’ the choiceof a human will that is ‘infallibly’ motivated by God'sefficacious grace.

Human beings, by their own nature, always have the powerto sin and to resist grace, and since the time of their corruptionthey always have an unfortunate depth of concupiscence whichinfinitely increases this power of resistance. Nevertheless, when itpleases God to touch them with his mercy, He makes them do what hewants them to do and in the manner in which he wishes them to act,without this infallibility of God's operation destroying in any waythe natural freedom of human beings … That is how God disposesthe free will of human beings without imposing any necessity on them,and how free will, which can always resist grace but does not alwayswish to do so, directs itself both freely and infallibly towardsGod. (Provincial Letters: I, 800, 801)

TheÉcrits sur la grâce, which was drafted atabout the same time as theProvincial Letters, summarizes the Augustinian position asfollows: God predestines some human beings for salvation and savesthem by “means that are certain and infallible” (II,262). There are also others to whom God gave graces “that wouldhave led them to salvation had they used them properly” (I,262), but He chose not to provide them with the ‘unique grace ofperseverance’ without which it is impossible to be saved. Bydefending the necessity of God's grace and its infallible efficacy,and by assuming that some people resist this divine assistance, Pascalwas forced by the logic of his position to endorse a theory of divinepredestination. If God were to provide efficacious grace to eachperson, they could not fail to be saved. Therefore, if some aredamned, that must be because God has decided not to rescue them fromthe Fallen condition into which they have been born as a result ofAdam's sin.

It would be easy, philosophically, to accept the limitations ofhuman powers on which this account is based as a theologically inspiredaccount of weakness of the will. However, it is difficult to see inwhat sense human choice is free when it is determined infallibly by adivinely originated desire that the will of each individual, to whom itis granted, finds irresistible. For Pascal, one's choice ofsalvation is free in the sense that it expresses one's strongestdesire; but the desire itself is communicated only to those who arepredestined by God, and is such that the recipient is guaranteed tofollow it.

4. Theory of Knowledge

Pascal did not publish an explicit theory of knowledge or philosophyof science in any single text. One can infer from disparateworks—such as his essays on the vacuum (written during the late1640s),De l'esprit géométrique (1655), andtheEntretien avec M. de Sacy (publishedposthumously)—that he had conflicting intuitions about naturalknowledge, although they all recognise the special role of religiousbelief. TheProvincial Letters provide a statement of hisgeneral overview: “How do we learn the truth about facts? Thatwill be from our eyes … which are the appropriate judges offact, as reason is of natural and intelligible things, and the faithis of things that are supernatural and revealed” (I,810). ‘The faith’ is not simply any religious faith; it isthe specific kind of belief to which Roman Catholics had access as agift from God. Apart from faith, which is directed to revealed truthsand the supernatural world, Pascal identified ‘experience andreason’ (I, 454) as the only ways of acquiring knowledge of thenatural world.

The scientific and theological controversies in which Pascal becameinvolved engaged him in epistemological disputes that were bothcommonplace and unresolved in the seventeenth century. These includedquestions about observations or experiments as sources of evidence,the certainty or otherwise of various types of knowledge claim, andthe epistemic status of hypotheses that are constructed to explainnatural phenomena.

Pascal was sympathetic to the mild, comprehensive pyrrhonism that isfound in Montaigne: “Montaigne is incomparable … fordisabusing those who cling to their opinions and who believe that theyhave found unshakeable truths in the sciences”(Entretien: II, 97). Despite this tendency towardsscepticism, Pascal frequently expressed confidence in the certaintywith which we can know ‘matters of fact.’ For example, heargued in theProvincial Letters that “matters of factare proved only by the senses” and that they are “easilydecided” (I, 812, 723). This was consistent with one of the mainlines of argument in theLetters. Pascal'sdefence of Arnauld hinged on the claim that the five propositionscondemned by the Pope as heretical did not occur in the text ofAugustinus, and that this fact could be established easily byinspection, i.e. by reading the book. On questions of fact, therefore,even the Pope (who, Pascal accepted, was an authoritative teacher ofrevealed truths) could be mistaken, and it is inappropriate to appealto any authority apart from one's senses to decide a factual question:‘authority is useless in that context’ (Preface totheTraité du vide: I, 452). The same kind ofcertainty about experimental facts, he thought, should have resolvedthe dispute about heliocentrisim that led to Galileo's housearrest. “It was in vain” therefore that the Jesuits“obtained from Rome a decree against Galileo … That isnot what will prove that the earth does not move; and if one hadunchanging observations that proved that the earth revolves, all themen in the world could not stop it moving” (ProvincialLetters: I, 813).

Even if facts could be known with certainty by observation, Pascalconceded that it would require the use of reason to understand orexplain natural phenomena, and that “the secrets of nature arehidden” (Preface to theTraité du vide: I, 455).To penetrate those secrets, one has to have recourse to hypotheses.Pascal's account of how hypotheses are confirmed, and the degree ofcertainty that one could claim for them, were ambivalent. Whenreflecting on the results of the puy-de-Dôme experiment, heargued against critics that not only had he established that themercury rises in a barometer because of the weight of the air, butthat the empty space at the top of a barometric tube is avacuum. Others (including Descartes) accepted the experimentalresults, but disputed this interpretation of them. They agreed thatmercury is supported in a barometer by the weight of the atmosphere;they also argued, however, that the apparently empty space in abarometric tube contains a subtle matter of some kind, that it hasphysical properties (for example, a specific size, or the capacity tobe penetrated by light, etc.), and that their interpretation of theapparent vacuum was as consistent as Pascal's with the experimentalresults.

Pascal's analysis of arguments that originate from hypotheses seems tohave been borrowed from mathematics. He argued that there are threetypes of hypothesis. The negation of some hypotheses implies an absurdconsequence, and they must therefore be true. The affirmation ofothers implies an absurdity, and these must be false. In a thirdcategory, if no absurd conclusion results from either the affirmationor negation of an hypothesis, one cannot draw any valid conclusionabout its truth. Logically, different assumptions may “lead tothe same conclusion, for everyone knows that truth is often concludedfrom falsehood” (Entretien: II, 90). When applied toexperimental situations, it meant that one could get apparentlyconfirming results from a poorly executed experiment or one that isbased on a mistaken hypothesis. Accordingly, even the phenomenalsuccess of the puy-de-Dôme experiment did not show conclusivelythat Pascal was correct about the vacuum. On the other hand, Pascalimplicitly assumed that a negative experimental result would havedisconfirmed the hypothesis that his experiment was designed to testbecause, by analogy with the claim that ‘absurd’consequences disconfirm mathematical hypotheses, he failed to realizethat scientific experiments test clusters of interconnected hypothesesrather than individual hypotheses. The Duhem-Quine thesis, as it isknown today, shows that negative experimental results may beattributed to any of the many hypotheses that are assumed inobservations or experiments, and that the certainty to which Pascalaspired cannot be realized even when experimental results areinconsistent with expectations.

This analysis left unresolved the status of scientific hypotheses.Do hypotheses provide genuine knowledge, despite their uncertainty? Ordid Pascal anticipate the solution later adopted by Locke and restrictgenuine knowledge to two categories: (a) what is perceived, and (b)what is ‘demonstrated’?De l'espritgéométrique adopts a foundationalist perspective onknowledge, in which ‘principles’ are first established andthe certainty of other knowledge-claims derives from that of theprinciples. Such logically interconnected principles and conclusionswere called ‘demonstrations’. Thus every demonstrationrequires that one first identify “the evident principles that itrequires. For, if one does not guarantee the foundations, one cannotguarantee the building” (II, 175). One establishes thecertainty of propositions if they are “deducible by infallibleand necessary logical steps from such axioms or principles, on thecertitude of which depends all the certitude of the consequences thatare properly deduced from them” (letter to Father Noël: I,378). This invites the question: does physical science providedemonstrations in this sense? Pascal limited‘demonstration’ to mathematics and ‘whatever imitatesit’ (II, 180). At the same time, he seems to have believed thathis own physical investigations were sufficiently similar tomathematics that they amounted to demonstrated knowledge, and thatexperiments or observations provided their foundational principles.

Accordingly, Pascal's preface to theTraité du vide(1651) claims: “the experiments that provide us with anunderstanding of nature continually proliferate; and, since they arethe only principles of physics, their consequences proliferateaccordingly” (I, 455). The certainty of experimental resultsbased on observation, their role as principles of a scientificdemonstration, and the facility with which natural philosophers couldperform appropriate experiments or make relevant observations, ledPascal to an optimistic interpretation of scientific progress. Heclaimed that, when researchers work together, they “makecontinual progress in science in proportion as the world getsolder” (I, 456). This apparently bright future for physicalsciences contrasted with the scientific failure of earlier naturalphilosophers, “those timid people who did not dare to discoveranything in physics” (Preface to theTraité duvide: I, 454) and is reflected in the comment in thePensées, Fragment 654: “To what extent havetelescopes revealed realities to us that did not exist for earlierphilosophers?” (II, 807).

In summary, Pascal adopted an interpretation of natural science thatexaggerated both the ease with which the consequences of observationsand experiments could be determined, and the simplicity of the logicallinks between theories or hypotheses and their apparently confirmingor disconfirming evidence.

In contrast with all knowledge that is derived from experience andreason, Pascal identified ‘authority’ as the exclusivefoundation of religious belief. Authority depends on memory and ispurely historical, because the objective is simply to find out whatsomeone said or wrote. This applies ‘especially intheology’ (Preface to theTraité du vide: I,452), a discipline which Pascal presents as if there could be nodispute about what is revealed in the scriptures or, morefundamentally, about whether a particular writing belongs among thecanonical texts. He could not have avoided noticing that there weremany religious traditions that claimed to report divine revelations,and that each in turn rested its claims on its own authority as areliable witness to earlier historical events and theirinterpretation. This was apparent even with Christianity and, withinCatholicism, Pascal was familiar with decisions of church Councilsthat determined which interpretations of its doctrinal history wereacceptable and which were anathemized as heretical. Thus the historyof churches was rife with disputes about how to identify theappropriate religious authorities. Since Pascal rejected the validityof rational arguments as a criterion for distinguishing between whatwas authentic or otherwise in Christian belief, he had to relyultimately on a personal choice of what to believe about thesupernatural, and then to interpret that personal choice as if it wereinspired by a special grace from God.

It seems evident that the circularity of Pascal'sself-justification could be repeated, with appropriate changes, byequally committed members of other religious traditions.

5. Ethics and Politics

In the discussion of what he described in theProvincialLetters as the ‘perniciously lax’ morality of theJesuits, Pascal classifies many human actions — such ashomicide, in cases where is it not justifiable as self-defence— as obviously immoral, and as widely recognised as such. Hecharacterizes these immoral actions variously as contrary to the‘natural light’, to ‘common sense’ or the‘natural law.’ As Ferreyrolles (1984) shows, there arenumerous references in Pascal to a ‘law ofnature’. However, Pascal does not argue that this natural lawcan be discovered by reason, or that it acquires its obligatory forcefrom human convention or contracts. The Jansenist interpretation ofthe human condition implied that human nature is corrupt, andtherefore that reason is now an unreliable moral guide. “Thereare undoubtedly natural laws, but our fine corrupted reason hascorrupted everything” (Fragment 56: II, 560). According to thisview, God had provided reliable moral guidance to human beings in theprelapsarian state of nature, and some remnants of God's law continueto be reflected in Fallen nature. Natural law, therefore, is whatremains of God's law in the state of concupiscence of human natureafter the Fall. There is thus no independent, philosophical account ofmorality available in Pascal, apart from the law of God which is moreor less dimly revealed.

According to God's law, or those elements of it which survivein the widely held opinions of human beings all over the world, thereare certain actions which are intrinsically evil or good. Our moralduties include not only the more familiar examples, such as theobligation to refrain from voluntary homicide; Pascal also quotes withapproval from Cajetan that “we are obliged by justice to givealms from our surplus, to alleviate even the common necessities of thepoor … those who are rich are merely stewards of their surplus,in order to give it to whoever they select from among those who are inneed” (Letters: I, 714).

Having assumed that there are objective moral obligations, Pascaldirects his critique, both in theProvincial Letters and inhis contributions to theÉcrits des Curés deParis, to the claim, attributed to Jesuit casuists, that one canchange the moral character of actions by changing one'sintention at the time of their performance. On this account, if anagent acts immorally while formally intending to act immorally,nothing can excuse the action in question. In all other cases,however, Pascal described Jesuit casuisty as teaching that it ispossible to modify the moral character of an action by applying themethod of “directing the intention, which consists in selectingsomething that is permitted as the objective of one's actions”(Letters: I, 649). This escape from moral responsibilityrelies on the principle that “it is the intention whichdetermines the [moral] quality of an action” (Letters:I, 679).

The claim that one could direct one's intention away from what isotherwise a morally reprehensible action was consistent with thecasuists' defence of the doctrine of ‘probabilism’. Thisdoctrine, to which Pascal also objected, meant that one may decidemoral issues according to any opinion which is said to be‘probable’, even if it is much less probable thanalternative opinions. ‘Probable’ in this context hadlittle to do with calculations of probability, but was defined as“everything that is approved by well-known authors”(Letters: I, 732). The limits of what was morally acceptablewere thus provided by examining the writings of approved authors andfinding the least demanding moral opinions available in theliterature. Pascal's satirical critique of Jesuit casuistry assumes,in contrast, that human actions have a moral character that isindependent of the private thoughts or intentions of the agent whoperforms them, and that one cannot ameliorate them by‘intending’ results that differ from the actual effects orconsequences that follow naturally from a given action. In that sense,Pascal's critique is an early version of a modern objection to theso-called ‘Principle of Double Effect.’

Pascal's political theory was likewise dictated by his accountof human concupiscence. According to Fragment 90 of thePensées, “concupiscence and force are thesources of all our actions. Concupiscence causes voluntary actions,and force causes those that are involuntary” (II, 570). Althoughthe state of nature before the Fall of Adam was capable of guidinghuman behaviour, human relations are now completely compromised byconcupiscence and by the exercise of power by one person overanother. One inevitable effect of this unwelcome subservience is thatwe are coerced into obeying those who exercise political power overus, and this can be interpreted as punishment for our sinfulcondition. This pessimistic interpretation of political power and itsa possible abuse coincided with that of Luther andCalvin. TheTrois Discours sur la condition des grandsdistinguishes between natural gifts or abilities, which vary from oneindividual to another and may provide a basis for our esteem, andvariations in social status or political power, which result fromhuman contingency and require only that we obey and salute those whohappen to be our superiors (II, 194–9). The natural equality ofhuman beings that is implicit in this analysis, however, provides nobasis for any theory of justice which would justify opposition to anestablished civil society or government, no matter how tyrannical itmay be (Boveet al., 2007: pp. 295 ff). In fact, there is noindependent perspective available to corrupt human beings from whichone may query whether the laws of a country are just; they are just,by definition, simply because they are the laws. “Justice iswhat is established; thus all our established laws will necessarily beaccepted as just without being examined, because they areestablished” (Fragment 545: II, 776). A more extreme expressionof the same view, in thePensées, is that“justice, like finery, is dictated by fashion” (Fragment57; II, 562).

This political conservatism, which was partly motivated by Pascal'sexperience of wars and partly by his theory of corrupt human nature,is reflected in his claim that “the worst evil of all is civilwar” (Fragment 87: II, 569). In theProvincial Letters, he directs readers to the moral teachingof the Gospels to guide them in political action. “The Church… has always taught her children not to render evil for evil… to obey magistrates and superiors, even those who are unjust,because we must always respect in them the power of God who has setthem over us” (I, 744). This compulsory tolerance of the statusquo, for the sake of the common good, did not preclude comparativeassessments of the merits or otherwise of different political systems.However, even in such assessments, the criterion applied by Pascalremained narrowly and theologically focused on the extent to whichpolitical arrangements facilitated citizens in the performance oftheir primary duties to God.

The appropriate attitude of subjects or citizens to establishedpolitical authorities that govern them was exemplified, acutely, inthe demand by the civil powers in Paris that even conscientiouslyobjecting Jansenists had to sign and obey the formulary whichcondemned the five propositions allegedly found in Jansen'swork. Dissenters like Pascal were not required to assent, inconscience, to what they did not believe; but they were required toassent in their behaviour, and to obey their political andecclesiastical superiors. Likewise, the subjects of Pascal's politywere not required to esteem their political masters, nor to holdbeliefs about them as human beings which they did not believe weretrue. It was enough that they obey them, that they observe the laws intheir behaviour, and that they offer them the public deference thatwas appropriate to their status as God's representatives, worthy orotherwise, on earth.

6. Pascal and Human Existence

While it would be anachronistic to describe Pascal as anexistentialist, one of the most prominent features of his work is thephilosophical reflection on the radical contingency of human affairsthat emerges especially in the final years of his life. He used thesereflections to puncture the pride, arrogance, and self-love of thosewho thought of themselves as superior to the vicissitudes of humanlife. Oliver Cromwell provided a contemporary illustration by his fallfrom power as a result of a relatively trivialillness. “Cromwell would have ravaged the whole of Christendom;the royal family was lost, and his own family was about to becomeall-powerful, except for a little grain of sand that lodged in hisbladder. Even Rome was about to tremble beneath him. Once this littlepiece of stone became lodged there, he died, his family was disgraced,peace was established all round, and the king was restored”(Fragment 632: II, 799). Many of Pascal's intuitions about thecontingency of human existence were a commonplace in the period,especially among Calvinist theologians (Rivet, 1651). They wereinspired in part by a growing acceptance within cosmology of theinfinite extent of the universe and, in contrast, the relative brevityof human lives. They owed even more to a theological perspective thatclaimed to represent human affairs from God's perspective, includingthe absolute will by which He predestines individuals for salvation oreternal perdition. Pascal's distinctive contribution was to capturesome of these insights in the elegant, pithy phrases thatcharacterized the poetic style of thePensées.Fragment 104, for example, compares a human life to a ‘thinkingreed.’ “It is not in space that I should search for mydignity, but in the control of my thoughts … The universecomprehends me by space and engulfs me like a point; by means ofthought, I comprehend it” (II, 574).

One could question the validity of considering the value of finitebeings from the naturalistic perspective of an infinite universe, oreven the conceivability of a divine perspective that, even accordingto Pascal, is not naturally accessible to finite minds. Given hisextremely poor health and the expressions of abandonment that emergefrom his later writings, one cannot avoid considering whether Pascal'schoice of ‘wretchedness’ (la misère) as asub-title for one group of ‘thoughts’ reflected hispersonal experiences. “The greatness of human beings consists intheir ability to know their wretchedness” (Fragment 105: II,574). Pascal's rejection of any naturalistic explanation of the humanmind or soul, his emphasis on dread of an unknown future (because,according to his theology, we do not know whether we are saved ordamned), the apparent insignificance of human existence, and theexperience of being dominated by political and natural forces that farexceed our limited powers, strike a chord of recognition with some ofthe existentialist writings that emerged in Europe following theSecond World War. This was philosophy in a different register. Forthat reason, some commentators reject the suggestion that Pascal wasnot a philosopher (Brun, 1992; Hunter, 2013). Rather than speculateabout matters that transcend the limited capacity of the humanintellect, Pascal invites his readers to recognize the description ofhis personal experiences as resonating with their own. Whileemphasizing the natural insignificance of individual human lives, hedid not conclude that human existence was absurd. He pointed instead,as Christian existentialists have done since, to a source of meaningthat would transcend the limitations of our thought. Access, however,was strictly limited to those to whom God freely gave the gift ofreligious faith, without any merit on the part of the recipient.

Bibliography

Pascal's Works

• Oeuvres complètes, L. Lafuma(ed.), Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963.
• Oeuvres complètes, J. Mesnard(ed.), 4 out of 7 projected volumes published to date, Paris:Desclée de Brouwer, 1964–92.
• Oeuvres complètes, M.Le Guern (ed.), 2 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2000.
• The Physical Treatises of Pascal, I. H.B. and A. G. H. Spiers (trans.), New York: Octagon Books, 1973.
• Pensées, P. Sellier (ed.),Paris: Bords, 1991.
• The Provincial Letters, A. J.Krailsheimer (trans.), Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967.
• Pensées and other writings, H.Levi (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Related Early Works

• Arnauld, A., 1703.De la fréquente communion, ou lessentimens des Peres, des papes, et des Conciles, touchant l'usagedes Sacrements de Penitence & d'Eucharistie sont fidellementexposez. Lyon: Plaignard. (1^st edn. 1644).
• Arnauld, A. and P. Nicole, 1662.La Logique ou l'art depenser, 2^nd edn., P. Clair and F. Girbal (eds.),Paris: Vrin, 1993.Logic or the Art of Thinking, J. Buroker,(trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Augustine,On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and FreeChoice, and Other Writings, P. King (trans.), Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Jansenius, C., 1640.Augustinus, Louvain.
• Jansenius, C., 1642.Discours de la réformation del'homme intérieur, Paris: Éditions Manucius,2004.
• La Forge, Louis de, 1666.Traitté de l'esprit del'homme, Paris: T. Girard.Treatise on the Human Mind,D. Clarke (trans.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.
• Rivet, André, 1651.Les dernieres heures de MonsieurRivet vivant, Ministere de la Parole de Dieu, Delf:Woodward.

Recommended Secondary Literature

• Baird, A. W. S., 1975.Studies in Pascal's Ethics, TheHague: Nijhoff.
• Bove, L., Bras, G. and Méchoulan (eds.), 2007.Pascalet Spinoza, Paris: Éditions Amsterdam.
• Brun, Jean, 1992.La philosophie de Pascal, Paris:Presses universitaires de France.
• Carraud, V., 1992.Pascal et la philosophie, Paris:Presses universitaires de France.
• Cléro, J-P., 1999.Les Pascals à Rouen1640–48, Rouen: l'Université de Rouen.
• Clarke, Desmond M., 2011. “The Epistemology of ReligiousBelief,” in D. M. Clarke and C. Wilson (eds.), The OxfordHandbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 548–70.
• Cole, J. R., 1995.Pascal: The Man and his Two Loves, NewYork and London: New York University Press.
• Davidson, H. and P. H. Dubé (eds.), 1975.AConcordance to Pascal's Pensées, Ithaca and London:Cornell University Press.
• Edwards, A. W. F., 1987/2002.Pascal's ArithmeticalTriangle, London: Griffin; Oxford: Oxford University Press;Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Ferreyrolles, G., 1984.Pascal et la raison du politique,Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
• Hacking, I., 1975.The Emergence of Probability,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hammond, N. (ed.), 2003.The Cambridge Companion toPascal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hunter, Graeme, 2013.Pascal the Philosopher: AnIntroduction, Toronto and London: University of TorontoPress.
• Kremer, E. J. (ed.), 1994.The Great Arnauld and Some of hisPhilosophical Correspondents, Toronto and London: University ofToronto Press.
• Le Guern, M., 2003.Pascal et Arnauld, Paris:Champion.
• Maire, A. (ed.), 1925–27.Bibliographiegénérale des oeuvres de Blaise Pascal, 5 vols.,Paris: H. Leclerc.
• Moriarty, Michael, 2006.Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: EarlyModern French Thought II, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sellier, P., 1970.Pascal et Saint Augustin, Paris:Armand Colin.

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