Blaise Pascal - Pensées de M. Pascal - 1715

Pascal's Pensées offer a fragmentary philosophical reflection centered on the human condition. In them, Pascal describes man as a profoundly contradictory being, at once miserable because of his finitude and great due to his capacity to think. He shows the limits of reason, effective in the sciences but powerless to answer ultimate questions, and asserts the existence of another form of knowledge, intuitive and inner. Through the analysis of amusements, he reveals the human tendency to flee from his own condition, while the wager illustrates the idea that man is compelled to choose and commit himself despite the absence of absolute certainty. The Pensées thus appear as a philosophy of lucidity, risk, and lived existence.

Blaise Pascal, born in 1623 and died in 1662, is one of the most singular figures of seventeenth‑century French thought, at the crossroads of science, philosophy, and religion. A child prodigy, he early distinguished himself through his work in mathematics and physics, notably on probability, geometry, and the vacuum. From the 1650s, he turned more and more toward religious reflection marked by Jansenism and by an intense spiritual experience. His thought is characterized by a merciless lucidity about human nature, which he perceives as deeply contradictory, capable of greatness but mired in weakness and illusion. Pascal is neither a systematic theologian nor an abstract philosopher: his fragmentary, lively, and incisive writing reflects a thinking in motion, always aimed at the essential. The Pensées, published after his death, condense this exceptional intellectual trajectory and make Pascal one of the most influential moralists and thinkers in European culture.



PASCAL, Blaise - Thoughts of Mr. Pascal on religion and some other subjects.

Paris, 1715. New edition.

Complete in 1 volume, in-12.

Full brown calfskin binding of the period in good condition. Spine with raised bands, gilt tooling well preserved and bright. Wear and small losses at the corners and headcaps. Boards stained. All edges red. Interior well preserved, paper slightly foxed.

Good specimen