Who is Montaigne? Who is Pascal?

Question

What have they written? Do they talk about society, social justice and how laws serve justice?

Answer 1

"Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592
Montaigne is an important figure in the intellectual history of the west because his world view was so vastly different from that of the orthodox Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic. He was the foremost apostle of urbanity after Plato (c.427-c.347), Cicero (106-43) and Plutarch (c.46-c.120). He has been likened to his near contemporary, Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), but Montaigne went much further in his repudiations that Erasmus ever would have contemplated. Montaigne demonstrates how the modern era failed to break sharply with the medieval. A virulent critic of medieval Scholasticism, he was at the same time a moderate follower of St. Augustine (354-430), the most dogmatic and intolerant of Christian theologians. Like many French thinkers of his age, he adopted the Augustinian attitude of highly personal introspection, skepticism of positive empirical knowledge, and a self-conscious analysis of nature and human problems. Just the same, this did not prevent Montaigne from embracing intellectual attitudes entirely at odds with those held by the author of The City of God.

Montaigne's education and training partly explain his divergence from orthodox patterns of thought. His religious background was highly diversified, his father being a devout Catholic and his mother a Jew converted to Protestantism. I imagine that this would have made it rather difficult for him to take seriously the presumptions of any one sect. In his studies and his reading, he was skillfully prepared for intellectual detachment and moderation. Montaigne was given a thorough classical education. He was well-read in Greek and Latin literature and found his favorite authors among the great pagans expositors of tolerance and secularism -- Plato, Plutarch, Cicero, the Skeptics and Epicureans. The pagan slogan that those who seek the truth must both refute without prejudice and accept criticism without resentment was reincarnated in Montaigne. The old world view -- the Medieval matrix -- was dissolved in Montaigne's day as the Attic world did in the time of Aristotle. Philosophical calm had to be created from within rather than secured by external institutions.

Montaigne was born in the early stages of the era of overseas discoveries and was greatly impressed by them. He was interested in the diversity of customs and beliefs entertained by mankind in various parts of the earth. This made it difficult for him to take seriously the Christian contention that there was but one absolute moral code to which men ought to subscribe. From his early training and his reading, then, Montaigne was the type of man who was well-suited to become an apostle of tolerance and moderation.

The starting point of Montaigne's philosophy was true intellectual humility. His philosophy was not grounded in Christian religious debasement, founded as it was in the assumption of sin, the fall of man and his spiritual unworthiness. Rather, he understood well the paucity of information which any one individual could obtain and assimilate and was also convinced of the intellectual limitations of humanity. In his essay, "Of the Education of Children," Montaigne writes:

I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me. I have no authority to be believed, nor do I want it, feeling myself too ill-instructed to instruct others.

It was necessary, Montaigne argued, that man constantly subject himself to the most searching intellectual self-examination in order to impress upon ourselves how little we really know. Such an attitude flew in the face of the medieval scholastic, smug in his intellectual arrogance, who believed that, armed with the Scriptures and the masters of theology, he possessed the sum total of necessary knowledge (salvation).

Whereas the Christians had emphasized the unity of all true wisdom and the uniformity of conduct essential to salvation, Montaigne stressed the opposite, namely, that diversity and pluralism seem to be the rule of nature, and hence of God as well. He arrived at this point of view because he was conscious of the varying moods of the human individual from day to day and, as an outgrowth of his observation of the enormous variety of human customs and beliefs, reported by ancient observers and by contemporary explorers. Montaigne was overwhelmed by how variable each individual indeed is, and how one's moods change from day to day, because of external conditions and internal stimuli. We differ more from ourselves than we do from each one another.

The combination in Montaigne of intellectual humility with a full comprehension of the inconstancy of man and the diversity of conduct to be observed in the world, served to develop in him a remarkable degree of tolerance and intellectual detachment. something I imagine necessary considering the volatile religious environment which characterizes his epoch. A factor making for his tolerance and urbanity was his repudiation of the otherworldliness of Christian theology. The Christian could not be tolerant or detached for the Christian could not remain indifferent to something which inevitably meant the loss of his soul and perdition for others.

Montaigne took full safety in contemplating the human scene. If philosophy is to teach us how to live rather than how to die, we must gather the largest possible amount of information as to the ways in which men live and then analyze this mass of material in calm and judicious fashion. When we allow emotion and prejudice to enter the process of assimilating such knowledge, we will fail to derive wisdom form the exercise. If nature reveals diversity to be the rule, then the theological effort to teach and enforce uniformity in thought and action must be incorrect and dangerous.

It was perhaps inevitable that in his discussion of morality Montaigne should depart from the Christian identification of morality with religious dogmas, and from the Christian tendency to regard morality as chiefly a matter of chastity in sexual relations. Because of his thoroughgoing secularism, Montaigne was able to attack the problem of ethics in a detached fashion. He perceived that man has devised a great variety of ways of meeting the chief problems of existence. Therefore, he could not subscribe in any sense to the Christian view that the only defensible solution of moral problems consisted of the narrow standards of conduct specified by orthodox Christianity. For Montaigne, God and nature seemed to approve of diversity rather than orthodoxy.

It ought to be clear that Montaigne challenged many of the leading tenets of Christian ethics. He repudiated entirely the Christian tendency to separate body from mind or soul, to regard the soul and its pleasures as good and the body and its enjoyments as base, and to represent bodily pleasures as separate from, and disastrous to, the operations of the mind. He argued that body and soul are given to man by nature and God. Bodily pleasures are as natural and defensible as the experiences of the soul. Indeed, reasonable indulgence in corporeal delights the mind may actually be refreshed and stimulated. Montaigne thus helped to break down the theological dichotomy of the world of spirit and the realm of the flesh, and insisted upon viewing the human organism as a unity.

There is nothing so goodly and so lawful as to play the man well and duly; nor any science so difficult as to know how to live this life well; and of our infirmities the most savage is to despise our being. . . . It is an absolute perfection and, as it were, divine for a man to know how to enjoy his existence loyally. We seek for other conditions because we understand not the use of our own and we go outside of ourselves because we know not what is happening there. Thus it is in vain that we mount upon stilts, for, be we upon them, yet we must go with our own legs; and sit we upon the highest throne in the world, yet we do but sit upon our own behind."

"Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put some thing before us to prevent us seeing it.

The French mathematician, theologian, physicist and man-of-letters, Blaise Pascal, was born June 19 at Clermont-Ferrand, the son of the local president of the court of exchequer. Pascal's mother died in 1630 and the family moved to Paris, where his father, a prominent mathematician, personally undertook his children's education. Unlike the famous education of John Stuart Mill, the young Pascal was not allowed to begin a subject until his father thought he could easily master it. Consequently it was discovered that the eleven year old boy had worked out for himself in secret the first twenty-three propositions of Euclid, calling straight lines "bars" and circles "rounds."

At sixteen he published a paper on solid geometry which Descartes refused refused to believe was the handiwork of a youth. Father an son collaborated in experiments to confirm Torricelli's theory, unpalatable the the Schoolmen, that nature does, after all, not abhor a vacuum. These experiments, carried out by Pascal's brother-in-law, Florin Périer, consisted in carrying up the Puy de Dôme two glass tubes containing mercury, inverted in a bath of mercury and noting the fall of the mercury columns with increased altitude. Again, Descartes disbelieved the principle, which Pascal fully described in three papers on the void published in 1647, when he also patented a calculating machine, later simplified by Leibniz, which he had built to assist his father in his accounts. Pascal was also led to invent the barometer, the hydraulic press and the syringe.

In 1648 Richelieu appointed Pascal senior to a post at Rouen, but the latter died died in 1651. Pascal's sister, Jacqueline, entered the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal, but Pascal divided his time between mathematics and the social round in Paris until November 23, 1654, near midnight, when he had the first of two revelations, according to a note found sewn into his clothes, and he came to see that his religious attitude had been too intellectual and remote. He joined his sister at her retreat at Port-Royal, gave up mathematics and social life almost completely and joined the battle of the Jansenists against the Jesuits of the Sorbonne who had publicly denounced Arnauld, the Jansenist mathematician, as a heretic. In eighteen brilliant pamphlets, the Provincial Letters (1656-57), Pascal attacked in superb prose, the Jesuits' meaningless jargon, casuistry and moral laxity. This early prose masterpiece in the French language, the model for Voltaire, failed to save Arnauld, but undermined for ever Jesuit authority and prestige.

Pascal's papers on the area of the cycloid (1661) heralded the invention of the differential calculus. Fragments jotted down for a case book of Christian truths were discovered after his death, August 19, 1662, and published as the Pensées in 1669 in order of completeness. The groundwork for Pascal's intended Christian apology, they contain the most profound insight into religious truths coupled, however, with skepticism of rational thought and theology. For more biographical details, please see the entry for Blaise Pascal from A Short Account of the History of Mathematics, (4th ed., 1908) by W. W. Rouse Ball. See also entries at the Catholic Encyclopedia, and the MacTutor. Pascal's minor works and selected letters, all from Volume 14 of the Harvard Classics (1909), are available as well."

Answer 2

If you mean who WAS Montaigne and who WAS Pascal...
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Michel de Montaigne
Name: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Birth: February 28, 1533
Death: September 13, 1592
School/tradition:
Notable ideas: The Essay
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592) was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is known for inventing the essay—he became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—and his massive volume Essais (translating literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over, from Shakespeare to Emerson, from Nietzsche to Rousseau.
In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. His tendency in his essays to diverge into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as a detriment rather than an innovation, and his stated motto that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by contemporary writers as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would be recognized as expressing, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the doubts and thoughts of his age. Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly —his own judgment—makes him more accessible than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary non-fiction owes its genesis to Montaigne, and writers of all kinds continue to read Montaigne for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal story-telling.
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Suppose you mean BLAISE Pascal:


Blaise Pascal
Born June 19, 1623
Clermont-Ferrand, France
Died August 19, 1662
Paris, France
Occupation mathematician, physicist, philosopher
Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the construction of mechanical calculators, the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote powerfully in defense of the scientific method. He was a mathematician of the first order. Pascal helped create two major new areas of research. He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen and corresponded with Pierre de Fermat from 1654 and later on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science.
Following a mystical experience in late 1654, he abandoned his scientific work and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées. However, he had suffered from ill-health throughout his life and his new interests were ended by his early death two months after his 39th birthday.

Answer 3

Blaise Pascal wrote Pensees ( random thoughts & notations on Christian faith ) after studying the Bible for six years after he had a profound religious experience . Pascal is best remembered for being a mathematics genious ; and was a philosopher & theologian .He believed that our knowledge of God comes from the glimpses of God that He allows us to have . Pascal's work is very inspiring and satisfying .