A Summer with Pascal

Antoine Compagnon, Catherine Porter

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674296619
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito religioso

From an eminent scholar, a spirited introduction to one of the great polymaths in the history of Europe.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) is best known in the English-speaking world for his contributions to mathematics and physics, with both a triangle and a law in fluid mechanics named after him. Meanwhile, the classic film My Night at Maud's popularized Pascal's wager, an invitation to faith that has inspired generations of theologians. Despite the immensity of his reputation, few read him outside French schools. In A Summer with Pascal, celebrated literary critic Antoine Compagnon opens our minds to a figure somehow both towering and ignored.

Compagnon provides a bird's-eye view of Pascal's life and significance, making this volume an ideal introduction. Still, scholars and neophytes alike will profit greatly from his masterful readings of the Pensées—a cornerstone of Western philosophy—and the Provincial Letters, in which Pascal advanced wry theological critiques of his contemporaries. The concise, taut chapters build upon one another, easing into writings often thought to be forbidding and dour. With Compagnon as our guide, these works are not just accessible but enchanting.

A Summer with Pascal brings the early modern thinker to life in the present. In an age of profound existential doubt and assaults on truth and reason, in which religion and science are so often crudely opposed, Pascal's sophisticated commitment to both challenges us to meet the world with true intellectual vigor.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on the Translation
• Preface
• 1. “That Terrifying Genius”
• 2. “Heel of a Shoe”
• 3. Amor Sui
• 4. “Mistress of Error and Falsehood”
• 5. “The Life of Monsieur Pascal”
• 6. “The Queen of the World”
• 7. “On the Art of Persuasion”
• 8. Tyranny
• 9. Casuistry
• 10. The Father
• 11. “I Find It Fitting That Copernicus’s Opinion Not Be Closely Analyzed”
• 12. Pascal and the Marxists
• 13. “The Eternal Silence of Those Infinite Spaces Terrifies Me”
• 14. Gradation
• 15. Violence and Truth
• 16. “Greatness of Establishment, Respect of Establishment”
• 17. “Thought Escaped”
• 18. “He Is Neither Angel nor Beast, but Man”
• 19. The Libertines
• 20. “Joy, Joy, Joy, Tears of Joy”
• 21. Pascal’s Method
• 22. The “Sublime Misanthropist”
• 23. “A King without Diversions”
• 24. The Three Orders
• 25. “The Heart Has Its Reasons”
• 26. “It Is Not in Montaigne”
• 27. The Three Concupiscences
• 28. The Mystery of Predestination
• 29. The Mystery of the Holy Thorn
• 30. The Middle Ground
• 31. Double Thoughts
• 32. “What Is the Self?”
• 33. Village Queens and False Windows
• 34. “Working for What Is Uncertain”
• 35. “Infinite Nothingness”
• 36. Private Vice, Public Good
• 37. “You Would Not Be Seeking Me if You Had Not Found Me”
• 38. “The Hidden God”
• 39. Geometrical Mind, Intuitive Mind
• 40. “L’honnête Homme”
• 41. M. de Mons, Louis de Montalte, Amos Dettonville, Salomon de Tultie
• Works Cited