Religion

Blaise Pascal French mathematician, physicist and philosopher. A precocious genius (invented the mechanical calculator at age 19); converted to Jansenism after his “night of fire” (1654). His philosophy is an existential wager and a confrontation with the reason of the libertines. Key Concepts The wager (Pascal’s wager): pragmatic argument about belief in God. If God exists and you believe — infinite gain; if he does not exist and you believe — finite loss. If he exists and you do not believe — infinite loss. Prudent reason bets on God — even without rational proof “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of”: there is an order of the heart — intuition, love, feeling — irreducible to the demonstrative logic of Descartes Misery and grandeur of man: man is a roseau pensant (thinking reed) — fragile as nature, but his greatness lies in thinking; more noble than the universe because he knows that he dies The two infinities: between the great infinity (cosmos) and the small infinity (atom), man stands in the middle — without firm foundation either in sciences or in metaphysics Diversion (divertissement): man flees from confrontation with himself through agitation — boredom reveals the human misery that diversion hides. Critique of social superficiality Critique of Cartesianism: Descartes’ method is useful in the sciences, but illusory as a foundation for faith or morality; “Descartes useless and uncertain” Jansenism: Catholic current that emphasized the irresistible grace of Augustine; Pascal defended Port-Royal in the Provincial Letters against the Jesuits Influenced by Saint Augustine — grace, sin, predestination Montaigne — skepticism, human misery (point of departure and adversary) Descartes — rationalism (critique) Ancient Pyrrhonism — skepticism as apologetic weapon Influenced Kierkegaard — wager, paradox, subjectivity of faith Existentialism — anguish and human condition Modern Christian apologetics Decision theory and game theory (wager as precursor) Works Provincial Letters (1656–1657); Pensées (posthumous, 1670 — fragments of an unfinished apologetic); Treatise on the Arithmetic of the Triangle (1654). ...

George Berkeley An Irish philosopher born in 1685 and later the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley produced his most important philosophical works while still very young, before the age of thirty. A man of faith and action, he even crossed the Atlantic with a project to found a college in Bermuda for the American colonies. He is remembered as the second great name of British empiricism, between Locke and Hume — and the most surprising of the three, for pushing empiricism to a radical conclusion: that matter does not exist. ...

Søren Kierkegaard Danish philosopher; the “father of existentialism”. Wrote frequently under pseudonyms to present opposing perspectives. His philosophy is a reaction to Hegel’s speculative system and the bourgeois comfort of institutional Christianity. Key Concepts Three stages of existence: Aesthetic: life oriented toward pleasure, novelty, aesthetics — the despair of inevitable boredom Ethical: commitment to duty, universal morality, marriage — the despair of unforgivable guilt Religious: suspension of the ethical by the singular before God — the “leap of faith” beyond reason Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844): human freedom as “vertigo of possibility”; anxiety has no determinate object (unlike fear) — it is dizziness before the abyss of the possible Despair (The Sickness Unto Death, 1849): unwilling to be oneself, or willing to be other than oneself — the universal condition of humanity without relation to God Subjectivity (“Subjectivity is truth”): existential truth is not attained through Hegel’s objective speculation, but through subjective and passionate commitment Leap of faith: Abraham who goes to sacrifice Isaac — an act that suspends the ethical and makes sense only before the singular of God; Camus criticizes it as “philosophical suicide” Pseudonyms: Victor Eremita, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Constantine Constantius — each represents a stage or perspective Influenced by Hegel — point of departure and principal adversary; rejects the speculative system Socrates — irony and indirect method; identified with him Plato — dialogues and Socratic position Luther — individual faith against institution Influenced Heidegger — anxiety, authenticity, being-toward-death Sartre — radical freedom, bad faith, existential project Camus — the absurd (but rejects Kierkegaard’s leap of faith) Simone de Beauvoir — concrete existential situation Existential theology (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich) Works Either/Or (1843); Fear and Trembling (1843); The Concept of Anxiety (1844); Stages on Life’s Way (1845); Philosophical Fragments (1844); The Sickness Unto Death (1849); The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859, posthumous). ...