Volition, Rhetoric, and Emotion in the Work of Pascal
Volition, Rhetoric, and Emotion in the Work of Pascal

Author: Thomas Parker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1135915903

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This study identifies and analyzes a compelling theory and practice of persuasion that integrates the complexity of human desire. It demonstrates how the philosophical component in Pascal's description of the will makes a seamless integration into a vehicle of persuasion and poetics, providing a privileged viewpoint for understanding the author's complete works, arguing that the notion of will is of fundamental importance in Pascal's anthropology as well as in his rhetoric. This avenue of interpretation is both fruitful and difficult, because the word "volonte" means very different things in Pascal and in modern French. Beginning by contextualizing the notion of 'volonte' and explaining its expanded use in the seventeenth-century lexicon, the author then endeavors to show that Pascal borrows an essentially Augustinian paradigm of desire to create a depiction of the will divided against itself, surreptitiously yearning for what its bearer does not want.

Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal

Author: D. Adamson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1994-12-19

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0230377025

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This chronological survey explores Pascal's (162362) achievement as mathematician, physicist and religious thinker; it also has a chapter on his life. His work on conic sections, the probability calculus, number theory, cycloid curves and hydrostatics is considered in detail. Analyses of the Provincial Letters and the Thoughts bring out the many distinctive features, thematicnn and technical, of each text. Pascal's lesser known works are also studied. There is a chapter on the Wager argument. A wide-ranging bibliography completes the book.

Catholic Particularity in Seventeenth-Century French Writing
Catholic Particularity in Seventeenth-Century French Writing

Author: Richard Parish

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-07-28

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0191618810

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'le christianisme est étrange' - Pascal, Pensées Pascal's assertion that 'Christianity is strange', provides the theme for Richard Parish's exploration of Catholic particularity, as it was expressed in the writing of the French seventeenth century. This was a period of quite exceptional fertility in a range of genres: apologetics, sermons, devotional manuals, catechisms, martyr tragedies, lyric poetry, polemic and spiritual autobiography. Parish examines a broad cross-section of this corpus with reference to the topics of apologetics, physicality, language, discernment, polemics and salvation; and draws evidence both from canonical figures (Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, St François de Sales, Madame Guyon) and from less easily-available texts. Parish aims to consider all those distinctive features that the heritage of the Catholic Reformation brought to the surface in France, and to do so in support of the numerous ways in which Christian doctrine could be understood as being strange: it is by turns contrary to expectations, paradoxical, divisive, carnal and inexpressible. These features are exploited imaginatively in the more conventional literary forms, didactically in pulpit oratory and empirically in the accounts of personal spiritual experience. In addition they are manifested polemically in debates surrounding penance, authority, inspiration and eschatology, and often push orthodoxy to its limits and beyond in the course of their articulation. This volume provides an unsettling account of a belief system to which early-modern France often unquestioningly subscribed, and shows how the element of cultural assimilation of Catholic Christianity into much of Western Europe only tenuously contains a subversive and counter-intuitive creed. The degree to which that remains the case will be for the reader to decide.

Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal

Author: Mary Ann Caws

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1780237685

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Few people have had as many influences on as many different fields as true Renaissance man Blaise Pascal. At once a mathematician, philosopher, theologian, physicist, and engineer, Pascal’s discoveries, experiments, and theories helped usher in a modern world of scientific thought and methodology. In this singular book on this singular genius, distinguished scholar Mary Ann Caws explores the rich contributions of this extraordinary thinker, interweaving his writings and discoveries with an account of his life and career and the wider intellectual world of his time. Caws takes us back to Pascal’s youth, when he was a child prodigy first engaging mathematics through the works of mathematicians such as Father Mersenne. She describes his early scientific experiments and his construction of mechanical calculating machines; she looks at his correspondence with important thinkers such as René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat; she surveys his many inventions, such as the first means of public transportation in Paris; and she considers his later religious exaltations in works such as the “Memorial.” Along the way, Caws examines Pascal’s various modes of writing—whether he is arguing with the strict puritanical modes of church politics, assuming the personality of a naïve provincial trying to understand the Jesuitical approach, offering pithy aphorisms in the Pensées, or meditating on thinking about thinking itself. Altogether, this book lays side by side many aspects of Pascal’s life and work that are seldom found in a single volume: his religious motivations and faith, his scientific passions, and his practical savvy. The result is a comprehensive but easily approachable account of a fascinating and influential figure.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 3, The Renaissance
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 3, The Renaissance

Author: George Alexander Kennedy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 790

ISBN-13: 9780521300087

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This 1999 volume was the first to explore as part of an unbroken continuum the critical legacy both of the humanist rediscovery of ancient learning and of its neoclassical reformulation. Focused on what is arguably the most complex phase in the transmission of the Western literary-critical heritage, the book encompasses those issues that helped shape the way European writers thought about literature from the late Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century. These issues touched almost every facet of Western intellectual endeavour, as well as the historical, cultural, social, scientific, and technological contexts in which that activity evolved. From the interpretative reassessment of the major ancient poetic texts, this volume addresses the emergence of the literary critic in Europe by exploring poetics, prose fiction, contexts of criticism, neoclassicism, and national developments. Sixty-one chapters by internationally respected scholars are supported by an introduction, detailed bibliographies for further investigation and a full index.

Why Read Pascal?
Why Read Pascal?

Author: Paul J. Griffiths

Publisher: CUA Press

Published: 2021-05-07

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0813233844

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Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is known in the English-speaking world principally for the wager (an argument that it is rational to do what will affect belief in God and irrational not to), and, more generally, for the Pensées, a collection of philosophical and theological fragments of unusual emotional and intellectual intensity collected and published after his death. He thought and wrote, however, about much more than this: mathematics; physics; grace, freedom, and predestination; the nature of the church; the Christian life; what it is to write and read; the order of things; the nature and purpose of human life; and more. He was among the polymaths of the seventeenth century, and among the principal apologists of his time for the Catholic faith, against both its Protestant opponents and its secular critics. Why Read Pascal? engages all the major topics of Pascal's theological and philosophical writing. It provides discussion of Pascal's literary style, his linked understandings of knowledge and of the various orders of things, his anthropology (with special attention to his presentation of affliction, death, and boredom), his politics, and his understanding of the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Pascal emerges as a literary stylist of a high order, a witty and polemical writer (never have the Jesuits been more thoroughly eviscerated), and, perhaps above all else, as someone concerned to show to Christianity's cultured despisers that the fabric of their own lives implies the truth of Christianity if only they can be brought to look at what their lives are like. Why Read Pascal? is the first book in English in a generation to engage all the principal themes in Pascal's theology and philosophy. The book takes Pascal seriously as an interlocutor and as a contributor of continuing relevance to Catholic thought; but it also offers criticisms of some among the positions he takes, showing, in doing so, how lively his writing remains for us now.