Abstract

The Pensées is a difficult book. When originally published in 1670, eight years after Pascal’s death, it was simply a collection of “thoughts” or pensées found among his papers after his death. Modern editors have based their editions on two seventeenth-century copies that group many of the fragments into thematic groups that purport to reflect Pascal’s own organization. Even so, the Pensées is still a collection of fragments. The reader, particularly the first-time reader, needs a guide.It was well known among his friends that Pascal was working on an apology for Christianity. In Pascal: Reasoning and Belief, Michael Moriarty is attempting both to recover Pascal’s plan for this apology and to offer a philosophical...