Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a major seventeenth-century thinker, standing at the intersection of philosophy, science, and theology. A brilliant mathematician and physicist, he also produced a distinctive philosophical work centered on a radical inquiry into the human condition. In the unfinished Pensées, Pascal examines the misery and greatness of humanity, torn between reason and infinity, clarity and diversion. He exposes the limits of pure rationality and argues for another form of knowledge grounded in inner experience and the “heart.” His thought offers a demanding and tragic anthropology, in which the search for truth engages the whole of human existence.