-:- Pascal Reading List by Katharena -:-

Blaise Pascal: Main Page | Thought Provoking Quotes by Pascal | Discuss existentialism and Blaise Pascal | Pascal Precocious in Mathematics | Pascal's “Les Provinciales” | Pascal's Christian Apologetics | Blaise Pascal : Books and Reviews | Katharena's Essential Pascal, Cheat Sheet!

• Meet Blaise Pascal
• Realm of Existentialism
• Minds of Existentialism
• Basics of Existentialism
• Existential Quotes
• Theatre of the Absurd
• Existential-Speak
• Existential Think Tank
• 54 Existential Essentials
• Existential Divas!

Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. Pascal laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities, formulated what came to be known as Pascal's law of pressure, and propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason. The establishment of his principle of intuitionism had an impact on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists.

At once a physicist, a mathematician, an eloquent publicist in the Provinciales, and an inspired artist in the Apologie and in his private notes, Pascal was embarrassed by the very abundance of his talents. It has been suggested that it was his too concrete turn of mind that prevented his discovering the infinitesimal calculus; and in some of the Provinciales the mysterious relations of human beings with God are treated as if they were a geometrical problem. But these considerations are far outweighed by the profit that Pascal drew from the multiplicity of his gifts; his religious writings are rigorous because of his scientific training; and his love of the concrete emerges no less from the stream of quotations in the Provinciales than from his determination to reject the vigorous method of attack that he had used so effectively in his Apologie.