Modern Age - Winter 2017 - 36

MODERN AGE

WINTER 2017

nature and its dominant instinct, the will to power, which had
been concealed only by Enlightenment claims of the emancipation of man through reason.2
How does Pascal fit into this history of modern thought? Pascal
was fourteen years old when Descartes's Discourse on Method
was published in 1637. Like Descartes, Pascal was a great mathematician and scientist. At sixteen, he wrote an essay on conic sections, and later he worked out the foundation for the infinitesimal
calculus, the integral calculus, and the calculus of probabilities, all
in advance of the accomplishments of Newton and Leibniz. His
study of atmospheric pressure resulted in what is known as Pascal's Law. He also built the first computer, a calculating machine,
which is still on display in a Paris museum. You may remember a
programming language that was named for him. So, he was very
much a participant in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth
century.
Pascal, like Descartes, believed that the medieval Scholastic approach to nature was gravely flawed.3 In this respect, he
accepted the Cartesian break with the tradition of scientific inquiry
dating back to Aristotle and carried through the Middle Ages
to the Renaissance. However, unlike Descartes, Pascal sees very
clearly the limits of modern science and of the kind of knowledge
that can be arrived at through the scientific method. For modern scientific reason, we do not know anything through a direct
encounter between the mind and the world. Experience is not
what is given to us by the world; it is structured by the categories
of the mind and the rules of the scientific method. The center of
philosophy shifts, then, from the contemplation of Being, including God, to the "I think" that is the first principle of Descartes's
philosophy. In other words, modern reason is the reversal of the
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Modern Age - Winter 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2017

Contents
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Cover1
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Cover2
Modern Age - Winter 2017 - Contents
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