The present reading of the Pensées of Pascal comprises the following sections, each consisting of the fragments given in the numberings of Sellier and Lafuma:
RENDRE LA RELIGION AIMABLE (S 254–5, L 221–2)
FONDEMENTS (S 256–77, L 223–44)
LOI FIGURATIVE (S 278–307, L 245–76)
RABBINAGE (S 308–10, L 277–8)
PERPÉTUITÉ (S 311–21, L 279–89)
PREUVES DE MOISE (S 322–8, L 290–7)
I attempt brief summaries of these sections.
Below is the text, in French, of the first in a series of readings of
Pascal’s Pensées, being discussed over Zoom in the spring of
2021. Here is the complete list of readings, linked to blog posts like
this one, along with additional related posts:
By the account of Martha Nussbaum, philosophy is one of two things:
Nussbaum prefers the first, though having appeared in a film that promotes the second.
I watched and enjoyed the film, which is by Astra Taylor and is called Examined Life (2008). I first found it through a touching fragment, featuring a stroll in San Francisco by Judith Butler and Taylor’s sister Sunaura. Because they have a conversation at all, and on the theme that we all need one another’s help, the film becomes less subject to Nussbaum’s charge:
Portraying philosophers as authority figures is a baneful inversion of the entire Socratic process, which aimed to replace authority with reason.
This document contains fragments
edition of Pascal’s Pensées, in modernized French and the following sections:
In some of the Pensées, Pascal contrasts reason with instinct, passions, folly, the senses, and imagination.
Here I investigate Pascal’s raison, after one session of an ongoing discussion of the Pensées that is being carried out on Zoom.
To this post, I am adding this introduction in July 2021. I have returned to some of the ideas of the post, and I see that I left them in a jumble. They may still be that, but I am trying to straighten up a bit.
Beyond this introduction, the post has three parts. Part III takes up more than half of the whole post and consists of my notes on
In Anderson’s article I see – as I note below – ideas that are familiar, thanks to my previous reading of philosophers such as Robin George Collingwood, Mary Midgley, and Robert Pirsig. Henry David Thoreau may not exactly be one of those philosophers, but he is somehow why I came to write this post in the first place.
Here is a table of contents for the whole post:
This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, of the following writers.
Having originally posted this essay on January 9, 2021, I edited and augmented it, on January 19 and December 19 of that year. I return to it now, on June 22, 2023, having posted “On Dialectic,” two days ago; this one is another post that quotes lots of people, and I want to check how it reads. It reads fine, to me, although I did have to correct occurrences of “behavior” spelled as “behavor.” Moreover, although I had forgotten what was here, I recognized it instantly as I read; another reader would not experience this recognition.
What stands out most to me now is Christa Peterson’s suggestion,
A representation of our own gender … could … be a means of picking out people as who we are co-gendered with …
As the essay already suggests, if you replaced “gender” with “race,” then the resulting speculation could get you called a racist, and that is supposed to be something bad. However, if we replace “gender” with “sex,” we obtain a proposition that is fundamental to contemporary biology, as I understand it, because evolution is
I think this is why Nina Paley can say, in a blog post called “Why I Don’t Use ‘Preferred Pronouns’,” which I referred to also in “Imagination,”
Like most mammals, I can’t help but identify someone’s sex with +99% accuracy. (… Women, I think, are better at identifying sex than men, either due to instinct or conditioning for survival …)
We know that there are two sexes, and we know who is of which sex, the way we know that some foods are good to eat. However, Peterson seems to think of this knowledge a bit differently:
Trans people’s dignity and legitimacy does not depend on the success of any one attempt to conceptualize their experience. But the most common way, in terms of “gender identity,” is perfectly functional. The commitments of the popular notion are minimal: people have an internal sense of their own gender that can come apart from their knowledge of their assigned sex, and is generally fixed, and certainly not revisable in the way ordinary beliefs are.
What is the word “assigned” doing here? Does whether you are trans depend on whether somebody made a mistake when checking one of the boxes marked “male” and “female” at your birth?
A lot of old PSA’s about drugs are on YouTube and the Web Archive, and sometimes they are linked to by articles that ridicule them. There is one that I have not been able to find, perhaps from around 1970, in which parents confront their teenager with the drug paraphernalia that they have found in his room. The boy storms out of the house, saying, “You don’t understand!”
There’s a lot that I don’t understand. I must not, since it seems childish, but is coming from adults. Some of these adults stormed the US Capitol the other day; others encourage them; still others are professors of philosophy.
“Human egg and sperm cells.”
Asimov’s New Guide to Science (1984), page 600
One day during the Trojan War, Apollo and Athena decide to give the combatants a break. The general conflict is to be replaced with a one-on-one. The Olympians induce Helenus to tell his brother Hector to take on whichever of the Greeks is up for it.
Day or night?
Sunset over Lesbos
From the Anatolian mainland
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Note added May 19, 2026. I return to this post now, because the question arises with a friend of whether the US should be at war with Iran. This post does not actually answer that or any such question. It would, implicitly, if it said that war was never the answer, or war never solved any problem. This would absolve us from needing to think about any particular case, such as whether the American colonists should have taken up arms against the British Crown, or John Brown should have done the same against slavery. This post is mainly a response, by a mathematician and a product of a great-books program, to contentious or sententious things said by fellow academics. Concerning international relations as such, see the post referred to below, “External Politics.”
Pacifism is properly pacificism, the making of peace: not a belief or an attitude, but a practice. Mathematics then is pacifist, because learning it means learning that you cannot fight your way to the truth. Might does not make right. If others are going to agree with you, they will have to do it freely. Moreover, you cannot rest until they do agree with you, if you’ve got a piece of mathematics that you think is right; for you could be wrong, if others don’t agree.
This article gathers, and in some cases quotes and examines, popular articles about R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943).
By articles, I mean not blog posts like mine and others’, but essays by professionals in publications that have editors.
By popular, I mean written not for other professionals, but for the laity.
Polytropy 