The Cambridge Companion to Pascal

by Nicholas Hammond

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) occupies a position of pivotal importance in many philosophy, mathematics, physics, religious polemics and apologetics. A team of leading scholars surveys the range of his achievement and intellectual background as well as the reception of his work. New readers and nonspecialists will find a convenient and accessible guide to Pascal and advanced students and specialists, a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of his works.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 2003

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Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Companion is a very useful aid to anyone who is attempting to bring the Pensees and Pascal's thought as a whole into a coherent set of ideas. The Pensees can be so difficult to penetrate and make sense of, and open up so many different possibilities and lines of argument, that the reader can be left in a positively bewildered state, unsure what to make of the experience of reading this brilliant but ambiguous author. The articles here do a lot to help the reader who has made some progress in working through Pascal independently to make much greater progress by providing helpful analysis of Pascal's ideas and arguments and by bringing together aspects of Pascal's thought that are published in different places. I would rank the articles by Phillips (on Pascal's relationship with Descartes and Montaigne), Elster (on the formal structure of the wager--though the chapter on Pascal in Hacking's _The Emergence of Probability_ strikes me as more helpful overall, both should be read), Khalfa (on Pascal's theory of knowledge), Moriarty (on Pascal's conceptions of faith and grace), and Force (on Pascal's conception of philosophical method) as those most useful and essential to the reader who wants to discern the threads of order uniting Pascal's apparently disjointed thoughts.