Pensées

Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont, France, in 1623 and moved to Paris with his family in 1631. Pascal’s father, Etienne, was a noted mathematician who personally educated his children, including Pascal and his sister, Jacqueline.

Pascal, like his sister, showed himself early on as a prodigy and polymath. Especially gifted in mathematics, he designed at the age of 21 a calculating device, the “Pascaline,” often considered an ancestor of the modern digital calculator and computer. Later Pascal contributed to physics, conducting experiments in atmospheric pressure that yielded the discovery known today as “Pascal’s principle,” and to probability theory in mathematics. Toward the end of his life, Pascal designed what is often considered the first public transport system, consisting of horse-drawn carriages running across the Paris streets on schedule.

Alongside science, religion was central to Pascal’s life. A devout Roman Catholic, he became attracted as a young adult to the Jansenist religious movement (See: Background). Pascal’s turn to religion was intensified by a mystical “Night of Fire” that he experienced in November 1654 and later documented in the Pensées. Both the Pensées and Pascal’s other major literary work, the Provincial Letters, reflected religious controversies, especially the clash between Jansenism and the Jesuits, and between Christianity and philosophical rationalism and