Penses

A passionate defence of religious faith by the great seventeenth-century philosopher, mathematician and physicist

Blaise Pascal was the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, but it is his unfinished apologia for the Christian religion upon which his reputation now rests. The Penses is a collection of philosophical fragments, notes and essays in which he explores the contradictions of human nature in psychological, social, metaphysical and, above all, theological terms. Humankind emerges from Pascal’s analysis as a wretched and desolate creature within an impersonal universe, but also as a being whose existence can be transformed through faith in God’s grace.

Translated with an Introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer

Author: Blaise Pascal
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 12/01/1995
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.82h x 5.08w x 0.87d
ISBN: 9780140446456
Audience: Young Adult

About the Author
Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont in 1623, the son of a government official. During his short life he left his mark on mathematics, physics, religious controversy and literature. A convert to Jansenism, he engaged with gusto in a controversy with the Jesuits, which gave rise to his Lettres Provincialeson which, with the Penses, his literary fame chiefly rests. A remarkable stylist, he is regarded by many as the greatest of French prose artists. He died, after a long illness, in 1662.

Dr. A.J. Krailsheimer was born in 1921 and was Tutor in French at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1957 until his retirement in 1988. His publications are Studies in Self-Interest (1963), Rabelais and the Franciscans (1965), Three Conteurs of the Sixteenth Century (1966), Rabelais (1967), A. J. de Ranc, Abbot of La Trappe (1974), Pascal (1980), Conversion (1980), Letters of A. J. de Ranc (1984), Ranc and the Trappist Legacy (1985) and Correspondance de Ranc (1993). He has also translated Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pcuchet and Salammbo and Pascal’s The Provincial Letters for the Penguin Classics.