Pascal’s wager

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Blaise Pascal ◽  
Cosmological Argument ◽  
French Mathematician ◽  
Theistic Argument ◽  
The World ◽  
Pascal’S Wager ◽  
Theistic Belief

Pascal’s wager is a type of theistic argument developed by Blaisé Pascal, a French mathematician of the seventeenth century. There are at least four versions of the wager within Pascal’s posthumously published work, Pensées, each of which is a pragmatic argument. Pragmatic arguments for theism are designed to motivate and support belief even in the absence of strong evidence. They seek to show that theistic belief is permissible, even if one does not think that it is likely that God exists, and then to employ prudential reasons to conclude that one should accept theism. Other theistic arguments – the Ontological Proof or the Cosmological Argument for example - provide epistemic reasons in support of theism: that is, reasons to think that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, morally perfect being. According to Pascal, there is good reason to seek to inculcate theistic belief, even if one does not appreciate the evidence in support of theism (see Pascal 1960). The role of the wager, as Pascal conceived it, was to move self-interested individuals towards a perspective in which they could appreciate the evidence for theism. Understood in this way, the wager is not a pragmatic trumping of the epistemic, but a means of bridging the chasm between the pragmatic and the epistemic. The wager has the structure of a gamble, a decision made under uncertainty. Pascal assumed that a person, just by virtue of being in the world, is in a betting situation such that one cannot avoid betting one's life on whether God exists or not. The wager concerning God is forced, one might say, since trying to avoid wagering is tantamount to wagering for one of the alternatives. To wager that God exists is to take steps to inculcate theistic belief. To wager against is to do nothing. Bringing about belief is not an action that one can directly will, but one can take steps to try to bring about belief indirectly. If one wagers on God and believes, then there are two possible outcomes. Either God exists and one may have put oneself in a position to gain an eternity of bliss; or, God does not exist and one loses little, if anything. On the other hand, if one bets against God and wins, one gains little. But, if one loses that wager, the consequences may be dismal. Because the first alternative has an outcome that overwhelms any possible gain attached to nonbelief, the choice is clear, says Pascal, one should wager that God exists.

scholarly journals Violence in post-apartheid South Africa and the role of church and theology

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
C.F.C. Coetzee
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Church

South Africa is known as one of the most violent countries in the world. Since the seventeenth century, violence has been part of our history. Violence also played a significant role during the years of apartheid and the revolutionary struggle against apartheid. It was widely expected that violence would decrease in a post-apartheid democratic South Africa, but on the contrary, violence has increased in most cases. Even the TRC did not succeed in its goal to achieve reconciliation. In this paper it is argued that theology and the church have a great and significant role to play. Churches and church leaders who supported revolutionary violence against the apartheid system on Biblical “grounds”, should confess their unbiblical hermeneutical approach and reject the option of violence. The church also has a calling in the education of young people, the pastoral care of criminals and victims, in proclaiming the true Gospel to the government and in creating an ethos of human rights.

“A Few More or Less Make No Difference”

2018 ◽  
pp. 193-241
Author(s):  
Molly A. Warsh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
The World ◽  
Pearl Fishing ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
The City

This chapter considers how pearls’ subjective beauty, their complex and mysterious origins, and their powerful association with mastery of the seas allowed them to remain a powerful heuristic device for the expression of ideas about mutability, worth, and the nature of different places and peoples around the world. As empires moved to objectify profit and regulate the role of subjects in new ways, pearls continued to serve as a useful index (elenco in Spanish, a word Pliny the Elder employed to denote an elongated pearl but that, by the early seventeenth century, had come to stand for the very impulse to order and compartmentalize that the jewel provoked) of peoples’ highly independent and contingent calculations of worth. Through a consideration of crown-sponsored pearl-fishing interventions in the Scottish Highlands and along Swedish rivers close to the city of Gothenburg, this chapter traces how pearls continued to facilitate the expression of distinct approaches to resource husbandry at scales personal and imperial. The chapter further explores the late-seventeenth-century market for pearls in London and the jewel’s unstable political and economic value as expressed in private correspondence as well as in portraits of women and enslaved bodies whose value was considered impermanent and for purchase..

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Nadler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Nicolas Malebranche ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Universe

Nicolas Malebranche, a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wide-ranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism – of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent – is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect – material, cognitive and moral – of the universe.

scholarly journals Mellem Klosteret og Verden

2020 ◽  
Vol 82 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
Mette Birkedal Bruun
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Notion ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The University

The article presents Armand-Jean de Rancé’s reform of the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe. It positions Rancé’s ascetic programme within the wider devotional culture of seventeenth-century France, and explores in three registers the inherent dynamic between withdrawal from the world and engagement with the world. The first register concerns the abbot’s biography, the argument being that the familial, societal and ecclesiastical ircles inhabited by Rancé before and after his conversion are more closely connected than has been traditionally seen. The second is dedicated to the position of La Trappe in contemporary society and a discussion of the continuous traffic across the monastic wall of texts, guests, rumours and myths. The third involves an examination of the role of withdrawal and engagement in Rancé’s reform and its ascetic programme, showing how the abbot expounds the central notion of solitude as a place, a condition and a strategy. The article presents key insights from the author’s doctoral thesis, which was defended at the University of Copenhagen in June 2017.

“Sinarum gentes … omnium sollertissimae”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thijs Weststeijn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
The World ◽  
Intermediary Role ◽  
Collaborative Efforts

This chapter presents a penetrating survey of the multilayered cultural exchanges between China and the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It highlights the intermediary role of the Low Countries in transacting cultural products between two ends of the world. The author pays particular attention to a group of leading Dutch Jesuits who travelled to China, then called the Middle Kingdom, and transferred the newly acquired knowledge of Chinese language, philosophy, arts, and history to the Dutch Republic. Their collaborative efforts in translating Confucian classics disclosed a carefully reinterpreted version of Confucianism, filtered through the Christian truth, which in turn aroused a number of later translations and commentaries bouncing between ancient Chinese wisdom and post-Renaissance humanism.

‘THE CRUELL PRESSURE OF AN ENRAGED, BARBAROUS PEOPLE’: IRISH AND ENGLISH IDENTITY IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POLICY AND PROPAGANDA

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHLEEN M. NOONAN
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Identity ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
English Culture

Seventeenth-century English men and women, caught in the upheaval of the Civil War, sought to understand what it was to be English and sought to grasp England's proper role in the world. One of the ways in which they did this was through their encounters with other people. The Irish had a long history of interaction with the English, but in the middle of the seventeenth century their role in defining Englishness became acute. Late Tudor and early Jacobean commentaries on Ireland had stressed the superiority of English culture while acknowledging some virtues of Ireland and its people that would make it amenable to beneficial transformation by the English. In the middle of the century, occasioned by the events of the 1641 uprising, this ameliorative view of the Irish gave way to the view that English and Irish were incompatible. Earlier studies have emphasized the role of religion in the discordant relationship between the two peoples in the seventeenth century. This essay maintains that the shift in attitude had as much to do with ethnicity as it did with religion and considers the central role of John Temple and his treatise The Irish rebellion in changing English attitudes on both a national and local level. The study suggests that Temple's view became the dominant one for more than 200 years because of the demographic changes within the Irish community in London and puritan concerns about a godly community that occurred at the time Temple set forth his ideas.

‘Defying the Powers and Tempering the Spirit.’ A Review of Quaker Control over their Publications 1672–1689

1982 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas O'Malley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
The Press ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The role of the press in the history of post-Restoration nonconformity has gone largely unexplored. Indeed, the study of the press in the late seventeenth century has suffered from a lack of serious attention by historians and from a certain narrowness of vision in the otherwise excellent bibliographical work on the period. Bibliographers have tended to study books and printers in isolation from the world that the objects of their study inhabited. Historians have a tendency to see the press as mirroring the struggle for the growth of representative democracy and as playing an important part in national political and religious history only at times of maximum crisis, such as 1659–60 or 1679–81. Historians of Quakerism, although aware that the early Quakers made extensive use of printing, have neither detailed the extent of that involvement nor assessed its implications on a wider level. This article is written in an attempt to remedy, to some extent, these deficiencies.

scholarly journals Reading through Galileo's Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading*

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Spiller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
The World

This essay reassesses the role of reading in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by analyzing Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. The unreliability of telescopic vision becomes a dominant metaphor for the unreliability of reading printed texts. Where Galileo sought to put the reader in his own position as a scientific observer by making reading a form of observation, Cavendish used the telescopic image to show how readers become the makers of their own fictions. From the recognition that reading and observation finally reveal our relationship to the world rather than the world itself comes what will ultimately be the modern assumption that acts of observation are also acts of reading.

THE ROLE OF THE OTTOMANS AND DUTCH IN THE COMMERCIAL INTEGRATION BETWEEN THE LEVANT AND ATLANTIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehmet Bulut
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Present Article ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic

AbstractThe present paper focuses on the role of the Ottomans and Dutch in the early commercial integration between the Levant and Atlantic in the seventeenth century. As an expanding trading nation in the world economy, the Dutch Republic played an important role in the commercial integration between the provinces of the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe. The growth of Ottoman-Dutch economic relations in the seventeenth century followed the growth of economic relations between the provinces of the Empire and Western Europe.Therefore, the two world economic systems, the Ottoman and Western European economy increasingly opened to each other. Le présent article examine les rôles respectifs des Ottomans et des Néerlandais dans le début de l'intégration commerciale entre le Levant et l'Océan Atlantique au XVIIème siècle. Nation commerciale en expansion dans l'économie mondiale, la République hollandaise a joué un rôle important dans l'intégration commerciale des provinces de l'Empire Ottoman à l'Europe Occidentale dans la même période. La croissance des relations économiques entre le monde ottoman et la Hollande au XVIIème siècle a suivi la progression des échanges entre l'Empire et l'Europe occidentale. En conséquence, les deux systèmes économiques du monde se sont de plus en plus ouverts l'un à l'autre.

Malebranche, Nicolas (1638–1715)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Nadler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Nicolas Malebranche ◽  
Nature And Grace ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Mental Events ◽  
The Universe

Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wide-ranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism – of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent – is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect – material, cognitive and moral – of the universe.

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