George Eliot's Daniel Deronda advances a conception of freedom with clear Spinozist affinities. The development of Eliot's characters, and of their relationships to one another, can be understood fruitfully in terms of growth toward freedom or contraction to bondage, where the notions of freedom and bondage are very much in accord with Spinoza's views in the Ethics. A close reading of specific scenes and an analysis of the title character's arc in the novel discloses a view of human freedom which (...) is at once an attractive interpretation of Spinoza and a significant component of Eliot's ethics. (shrink)

Perhaps the best known criticism of Pascal’s wager is the many Gods objection. As so often with anglophone criticisms of Pascal, the many Gods objectiontypically treats the wager in isolation from the rest of Pascal’s thought. In this case, the truncated reading has issued in the view that Pascal was indifferent toor ignorant of the possibility that Gods other than the one described by Catholic theology might exist. This view is false. Even a cursory glance beyond the wagerfragment reveals that (...) Pascal considers a number of religious and philosophical positions and argues that, given the nature and needs of the human being, onlya God of a specific description could count as God for the human being and, so, be the object of the wager. This essay sketches Pascal’s view to show that the many Gods objection is not sufficient to address his argument meaningfully. (shrink)

This work is a study of Blaise Pascal's Pensees. It proposes to show the way in which Pascal's philosophy of mind---his conception of order and the relation of reason, the emotions, and the will to the self---which emerges from his skepticism, can be used to draw out his views on morality, despite the fragmentary state of the work. The thesis begins with a consideration of the three major philosophical precursors to Pascal's project: Augustine, Montaigne, and Descartes. It continues with an (...) account of order in the Pensees, centering on the heart, the two minds, and the three discontinuous orders, connecting Pascal's views to those of a number of 20th century analytic philosophers. It goes on to consider the order of the body and the order of charity in specific detail, showing how Pascal discusses each of these through a dialectical process that begins in a pre-critical, unreflective state, moves through a first, rational and philosophical, criticism, and finally turns that criticism against philosophy itself. The thesis concludes by briefly considering three figures whose ideas, to some extent, carry on and expand those of Pascal: Rousseau, Maistre, Tocqueville. (shrink)

This essay rejects two common views of Pascal: (a) that he holds only temporal and contingent standards of justice to be available to human beings and (b) that he is indifferent to all but eternal standards of justice. Against these reductive misunderstandings, I provide a detailed reconstruction of Pascal's political thought, drawn from the Pensées and other texts. I show that Pascal develops an account of two distinct and hierarchized orders of justice: a temporal order and an eternal order. Pascal (...) recognizes the integrity of the temporal order of justice, as expressed in local, particular custom and the historical development of positive law and, at the same time, holds that the axiological and ontological condition of this temporal order is an eternal order, a horizon beyond history which serves to ground it. Pascal's politics, rather than a tragic pessimism or a passion for the absolute, is simply a limited specification of his moral and metaphysical realism. (shrink)