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Second edition of Blaise Pascal's Pensées, 1670 The Pensées ( Thoughts ) is a collection of fragments written by the French 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal . Pascal's religious conversion led him into a life of asceticism , and the Pensées was in many ways his life's work. [ 1 ]
Blaise Pascal [a] (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen .
Blaise Pascal approached pessimism from a Christian perspective. He is noted for publishing the Pensées, a pessimistic series of aphorisms with the intention to highlight the misery of the human condition and turn people towards the salvation of the Catholic Church and God. [30] [31]
In the letters, Pascal's tone combines the fervor of a convert with the wit and polish of a man of the world. Their style meant that, quite apart from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Adding to that popularity was Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and satire in his arguments.
Because SparkNotes provides study guides for literature that include chapter summaries, many teachers see the website as a cheating tool. [7] These teachers argue that students can use SparkNotes as a replacement for actually completing reading assignments with the original material, [8] [9] [10] or to cheat during tests using cell phones with Internet access.
Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument advanced by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian. [1] This argument posits that individuals essentially engage in a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God .
Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad in which the sailor Charles Marlow tells his listeners the story of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior.
Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, who became notorious for his brutality, is one of the historical persons that may have inspired Kurtz's persona.. Kurtz's persona is generally understood to derive from the notoriously brutal history of the so-called Congo Free State, a territory that existed as the private property of King Leopold II from 1885 to 1908 until it was taken over by Belgium and became a ...