This document contains fragments
80–149 of the Lafuma,
115–182 of the Sellier
edition of Pascal’s Pensées, in modernized French and the following sections:
Raisons des Effets
Grandeur
Contrariétés
Divertissements
Philosophes
Le Souverain Bien
A [Port-Royal]
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.
By character count, the bulk of this post, in the third and final part, is my notes on
There are things I already thought, owing to philosophers such as Robin George Collingwood, Mary Midgley, and Robert Pirsig, if not Henry David Thoreau.
This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, especially of
Lilith Saintcrow on “Domestic abusers, white supremacists, and religious bigots”;
C. S. Lewis on gulling the educated, and objectivity as a dubious value;
Marilynne Robinson on consensus as concealing the objectively true;
Neil deGrasse Tyson on objectivity as a good value;
Plato on seeming wise, without being so;
Mark Vernon on imagination in William Blake;
whoever wrote an “Open Letter Concerning Transphobia in Philosophy,” signed by many professional philosophers;
Kathleen Stock, the subject of the “Open Letter”;
Agnes Callard on how philosophers shouldn’t be signing petitions;
Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, on the incoherence of the notion of gender identity;
Aaden Friday, on what’s wrong with Reilly-Cooper and other such women;
Brian Earp, on declaring pronouns;
John Steinbeck, on being a man;
Christa Peterson, on what gender identity might be.
I have edited and augmented this essay since originally posting it on January 9, 2021; the current version is from January 19.
