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14 - The reception of Pascal’s Pensées in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Nicholas Hammond
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The first commentary on the Pensées, before the Port-Royal edition was even published, is to be found in the Logique de Port-Royal (1662), the manual of logic edited by the theologians of Port-Royal, Arnauld and Nicole, who sought to establish a synthesis between Augustine, Descartes and Pascal. This attempt was significant because of the very nature of Pascal's thought and of the philosophy he attributes to his unbelieving interlocutor in the Pensées: that philosophy is inspired by Gassendi, particularly by Gassendi's Objections to Descartes' Meditations (French translation by Clerselier, 1647). Not that Gassendi was himself an unbeliever: despite R. Pintard's efforts to read irony and hypocrisy between the lines, most modern interpreters accept that Gassendi was an orthodox believer, but his philosophy inspired a number of notorious unbelievers, among whom Cyrano de Bergerac is the most prominent. Not that Pascal could have read Cyrano: the chronology of their writing and publication made that impossible. But Pascal did perceive, in the alliance between the philosophy of sociability - honnêteté - theorised by Méré and the sceptical philosophy inherited from Montaigne and modernised by Gassendi, a major threat to Christian doctrine, and he deliberately elaborated his apologetic arguments in order to resist that threat. The very structure of the apologetic argument in the Pensées requires that the unbeliever be led from principles he recognises and adopts to acceptance of the Christina doctrine which he initially refuses. Pascal thus attributes Gassendist principles to his unbeliever and builds his apology on those foundations.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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