Abstracts Pascal Biography

For Descartes, this most general knowledge is the extremely clear idea of ​​our mind. The position of Spinoza soon became the same. In none of his sciences, a person is not capable of complete ignorance - otherwise he would not have this science - no comprehensive knowledge. These attacks of Pascal were turned against scholasticism and even official theology. However, the philosopher also attributes to the dogmatic atheists.

The main mistake of all dogmas is a complete contrast of truth and error, while the truth is always partial, relative. The same should be said about error. And the same as good and evil. Reality, immersed in impenetrable gloom of infinity, is repeatedly superior to the possibilities of human understanding. A person as a bodily creature is condemned to understand only relative truth, for the comprehension of the whole surrounding him is always out of his possibilities.

Man claims to be a conqueror of nature, which emphasized in his exercises Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal himself as a scientist and methodologist of science. And above all, a person is powerless to predict his own life. In principle, Pascal interprets a person in cardusian,- that is almost the most basic manifestation of “infinity in the small”, “man is the most incomprehensible creation of nature for himself, for it is difficult for him to understand what a material body is even more difficult- what is a spirit, and it is completely incomprehensible, how a material body can connect with the spirit.

There is no task for a person, and meanwhile, and meanwhile, this is not true. himself "6. For Pascal, even the human body is an undoubted phenomenon of material nature - in all its complexity and its dependence on infinity is incomprehensible. Even the animal organism, which has completely turned into a mechanism for Descartes, cannot be considered such as the author of “thoughts”.

The theme of loneliness, abandonment of man in the endless spaces of the world is one of the Pascalevian thoughts that determine. But even in the most insignificance of man, the possibility of his greatness is concluded. The tree of his insignificance does not recognize a person feels insignificant, for he understands that he is insignificant: this is the great "man, repeats Pascal - not an angel, but not an animal.

Others want to abandon the mind and are likened to dull animals on this path - a very shameful life. After all, a person, according to his conviction, is “chimera”, “di-kovynka”, “monster”, “chaos”, “clot of contradictions”. Thus, since the “heart order” is opposite to the order of reason and is sometimes identified with the will, the phenomenon of intuition “heart”, “instinct”, which plays the main role in the epistemology of Pascal, is sensualized and irrationalized in some ways.

This feature distinguishes it from the epistemology of Descartes. Here you can see in Pascal the predecessor of Malbrand with his doctrine of the vision of all things in God. Unlike Hobbes, Spinoza and other theorists of "natural law" Pascal seeks to limit the effect of natural laws in this world as much as possible.

In contrast to such theorists, the events of the natural and even more human life, the French religious philosopher puts as a maximum dependence on the extracurricular God. For Pascal, deism was actually not different from atheism. He believed that they were equally alien, hostile to the Christian religion. Pascal is convinced that a person needs only a “living God”, which, in his opinion, can only be the god of the Christian religion.

The philosopher-monk believed that this personal, continuously creating God is not in an irreconcilable contradiction with the mystic-pantheistic god of Pascale's ontology. However, the great scientist still could not do without attempts to rational evidence of divine being. What will you put on? Setting "on the eagle", t. A deeply religious person defeated the pascal of the rationalist philosopher.

Pascal's ideas were ambiguously perceived in religious and secular circles. Against these champions of militant Catholicism, he in G. in France in our century arose the Society of "Friends of Pascal".