Blaise Pascal

4 Key excerpts on "Blaise Pascal"

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  eBook - ePub

  Early Modern Philosophy of Religion

  The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, volume 3

  • Graham Oppy, N. N. Trakakis(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  10 Blaise Pascal William David Wetsel    

  Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was a towering intellectual figure in seventeenth-century France, the last of the universal geniuses in European history. His discoveries and ideas still have great influence in modern intellectual and scientific life. A true polymath, he made contributions in physics, mathematics, philosophy and theology. Students of physics have heard of Pascal’s vases; students of mathematics know of his triangle. It was he who established experimentally that the weight of the earth’s atmosphere varies according to altitude and first gave theoretical embodiment to the idea of the vacuum. His ideas also gave rise variously to the concept of the calculator or computer and to inexpensive public transportation.

  In 1646, at the age of 23, Pascal had a profound religious experience when he became associated with a group of disciples of Jean du Vergier, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, who lived in the vicinity of Rouen. He accepted their doctrine of ‘conversion’ or abandonment of the world and submission to God, and even converted his family to Jansenism. This conversion, however, did not have an immediate effect on his work. One reason was that he became seriously ill in 1647 and returned to Paris, where his physicians advised him to find diversions from his work. That advice led him to relax the religious discipline.

  Another profound mystical experience occurred in 1654 when Pascal became intimately associated with the Convent of Port-Royal, where his sister Jacqueline had become a religious initiate and where Saint-Cyran was spiritual director. He recorded this second, intense religious experience in his Mémorial (1654). This experience marked Pascal indelibly for the rest of his life, as is evidenced by the fact that the Mémorial , a document of simple physical appearance dominated by lines, dashes and exclamations, was sewn into the lining of his coat. In the following year, 1655, one of the many retreats that Pascal undertook at Port-Royal led to his Conversation with M. de Sacy on Epictetus and Montaigne

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  Remarkable Mathematicians

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Learning Press

    (Publisher)

  In honor of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics), and as mentioned above, Pascal's triangle and Pascal's wager still bear his name. Pascal's development of probability theory was his most influential contribution to mathematics. Originally applied to gambling, today it is extremely important in eco-nomics, especially in actuarial science. John Ross writes, Probability theory and the discoveries following it changed the way we regard uncertainty, risk, decision-making, and an individual's and society's ability to influence the course of future events. However, it should be noted that Pascal and Fermat, though doing important early work in probability theory, did not develop the field very far. Christiaan Huygens, learning of the subject from the correspondence of Pascal and Fermat, wrote the first book on the subject. Later figures who continued the development of the theory include Abraham de Moivre and Pierre-Simon Laplace. In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical Period and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose. His use of satire and wit influenced later polemicists. The content of his literary work is best remembered for its strong opposition to the rationalism of René Descartes and sim-ultaneous assertion that the main countervailing philosophy, empiricism, was also insufficient for determining major truths.

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  Fluid and Particle Mechanics

  Chemical Engineering Division

  • S. J. Michell, M. Perry(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  Torricelli also gave the first description of a barometer (1644), hence the name Torricellian vacuum for the space above the mercury in a sealed tube. His French contemporary, Pascal (1623-62), supplemented the work of Torricelli on barometers and particularly on a vacuum, and his treatise on the equilibrium of liquids (1663) opened the way for the hydrau-lic press. Pascal is also supposed to have performed experiments on the compressibility of air but, as no records of this work exist, the distinction goes to Boyle (1627-91) and Mariotte (1620-84). The latter had also turned his attention to flow in canals and pipes, and was probably the first to observe that the resistance to flow is proportional to the square of the velocity, which—as we now know—is about correct for turbulent flow only. Newton seems to have intercepted the work of Mariotte while formulating his basic resistance equation from consideration of the change of momentum of fluid around a moving object. In 1738 Daniel Bernoulli (1700-82) published a classical work, famous for the theorem which bears his name. Bernoulli's guiding principle was that of the conservation of energy, and the theorem, which appears in various forms in all classical treaties on hydrodynamics, marks the ad- GENERAL PRINCIPLES 3 vent of the modern science of mechanics of fluids. In 1750 Euler (1707-83), arrived at a mathematical formulation similar to that developed by Ber-noulli, by the application of the momentum principle to inviscid flow. The theory has subsequently been greatly expanded by the contribution of a number of mathematicians, the most notable being D'Alembert (1717-83), Lagrange (1736-1813), Laplace (1749-1827), Navier (1785-1836), de Cauchy (1789-1857), and Stokes (1819-1903). The purely theoretical approach to the study of fluid mechanics, based on the simplifying assumption that fluids are ideal, could not satisfy engineers.

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  Modern European Philosophers

  • Wayne P. Pomerleau(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  4.2 Biography Whether he is called a philosopher in the strict sense or only in a loose sense, Pascal was a poly- math whose work in various areas had implications for the philosophical dialectic of the seven- teenth century. He was born in Clermont (now Clermont-Ferrand), France, on June 19, 1623, the second of three surviving children of Étienne Pascal, a lawyer who educated him at home. (His mother died in 1626.) In 1631, his father moved the family to Paris, where he introduced Blaise to Marin Mersenne’s circle of intellectuals. The boy was a prodigy, whose genius was evident. At the age of 12, he is said to have independently worked out for himself the first 32 propositions of Euclid’s geometrical system. In 1639, he wrote a treatise on conic sections, which was published the following year. In the early 1640s, he designed a calculating machine to help make easier his father’s work in the public tax department. He designed experiments to verify Torricelli’s view that Aristotelians are wrong to assume that “Nature abhors a vacuum.” He suffered from a frail and sickly constitution almost all his life. He studied the writings of Montaigne and Descartes; he met the latter, in 1647, in Paris, where they discussed mathematics (they did not seem to get along any better than Descartes and Hobbes did). In 1646, Étienne fell on ice, seriously injuring a leg. Two kind men, who were Jansenist Christians, nursed him, exposing him, his son, and his younger daughter, Jacqueline, to their stringent religious beliefs (the elder daughter, Gilberte, had already married and left home). Jacqueline wanted to join the Port-Royal convent as a nun, but her father forbade it. Five years later the father died; Jacqueline was determined to enter Port-Royal, and, despite her brother’s objections, she did so. Following the death of their father, Pascal entered the worldliest period of his short life, associating with libertines.

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