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BLAISE PASCAL : HEART AND LOGIC — ALEXIS KARPOUZOS
Pascal was well acquainted with what could and could not be known through the mathematical method, the experimental method and reason itself. Through his philosophical investigations, he found that there were strict limits to what we as humans could know. For him, neither the scientific method nor reason more generally could teach individuals the meaning of life or the right way to live.
Pascal also wrote about how humans tried to avoid thinking about their mortality, the extent of their ignorance and their liability to error. Yet he also believed that there was nothing more important for people to consider than their true human nature. In this reasoning, without understanding who we are, it would be difficult to understand how we ought to live.
In Pascal’s view, acquiring self-knowledge was a necessary stage on the way to recognizing one’s need for living with faith and purpose in something beyond oneself.
Pascal was a mathematician of the first order. At the age of sixteen, he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry…
