Talk:Blaise Pascal

images

There are too many images, and it's making this page crowded. I say we remove the stamp image, and develop a caption for the statue image. -- Removed this passage: "Following an accident in 1654 at the Neuilly bridge where the horses plunged over the parapet but the carriage miraculously survived, Pascal abandoned mathematics and physics for philosophy and theology." Source? Pascal's turn toward religion is commonly attributed to his mystical experience of Nov. 23, 1654. Mark K. Jensen 09:47, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Found a source placing the accident in question 15 days before Pascal's mystical experience. [1] Mark K. Jensen 01:25, Jan 26, 2005 (UTC)

Article Direction

When searching for Pascal I was brought to an article about the Pascal physics unit. It seems obvious that the biography of a man should come before an article about a connotation in the mans honor, so I think it should direct here first.

Semi-protected edit request on 29 November 2019

Request: Pascal had three sibling(s) not two. He had Older sibling and she died when she was child. Her name remains unknown. https://books.google.co.id/books?id=qpmGDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=pascal+is+third+child&source=bl&ots=FnMn72jFMx&sig=ACfU3U1xOKpGvBj6jDd3jo5DN-IHjYCprQ&hl=id&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj-gtXSiJHmAhUKbn0KHfu8DBMQ6AEwGnoECAkQAQ I'm not sure and I'm a little bit skeptical with some sources. More: http://famous-mathematicians.org/blaise-pascal/ https://prezi.com/fmw68lwidhds/blaise-pascal/ http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~greg/calculators/pascal/About_Pascal.htmMathemaphilosophie (talk) 21:10, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

 Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. – Frood (talk) 02:18, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request 1st Feb 2020

The sentence "Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette and the roulette wheel in his search for a perpetual motion machine.[25]" should be removed since the source is not reliable and offers no evidence of its own that this is true. Also, the link is broken. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 120.18.152.177 (talk) 23:21, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Edit request October 2020

"The latter contains Pascal's Wager, a probabilistic argument for God's existence." This sentence is found in the introduction to the page. It would be better to characterize the Wager as a practical argument for the belief in God's existence. Its focus is to persuade the listener to live and accept theism, not demonstrate its theoretical truth. This is obvious since the argument itself proceeds by admitting that God may not exist, which in any case is better not to be supposed, hence its conclusion.

I'm not sure I got my head around your criticism. I grant Pascal is something of a fideist and also that one could elaborate on the Wager and I've yet to do so, but it is definitely based in probability. It and Bayes Theorem are probably the two most famous instances of use of the mathematics of probability in philosophy. It is not a mere piece of rhetoric, but a piece of logic or at least mathematics. The force of the argument is not just practical but numerical; that belief in God is an infinite reward for finite cost. "Practical argument for God's existence" sounds more like Kant's moral argument for God's existence, which he would call based in practical reason. Your point seems to be that it's not an argument for the logical necessity of God, which is true, but then probabilistic in the sense of inductive rather than deductive inference is also correct. Cake (talk) 00:30, 27 October 2020 (UTC)