Blaise Pascal

Pascal was born in Clermont on 19 June 1623 and educated at home by his father, a mathematician; he was never trained in scholastic philosophy or theology. Ill for most of his life, he was nonetheless a precocious scientist: he built one of the first calculating machines, experimented with the vacuum and barometers, and was drawn into the circle of Mersenne as a young mathematician. He died in Paris in 1662, aged thirty-nine.

In the Provincial Letters he defended the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld and attacked the lax morality of the Jesuits. He never published a work of philosophy; his notes for a planned defence of Christianity appeared after his death as the Pensées. He admired Montaigne as a critic of dogmatism, and Epictetus as a moralist, though he thought it arrogance to believe, as Epictetus did, that we can perfect ourselves by our own efforts. His reflections on the contingency and fragility of human life have struck a chord with later existentialist writers.