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La reflexión teológica y moral más importante de Pascal. Traducción, prólogo y edición por el célebre crítico literario Juan Bautista Bergua y Luis¿Ruiz¿Contreras.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), un pensador profundamente cristiano, escribió Las Cartas Provinciales (Lettres Provinciales) bajo el seudónimo Louis de Montalte, entre los años 1656 y 1657. Escritas en medio de la controversia teológica entre los jansenistas y los jesuitas, las cartas son una defensa del jansenista Antoine Arnauld, de Port-Royal, un amigo de Pascal que en 1656 fue condenado por el Faculté de Théologie de la Sorbona en París por opiniones que se consideraron heréticas.
En este conjunto de diecinueve cartas que componen "Las Cartas Provinciales" Pascal aborda importantes e interesantes problemas teológicos y morales entre los que podemos destacar: ¿Qué es la gracia?, ¿quién la recibe?, ¿cuál es nuestra responsabilidad, con o sin la gracia, ante ciertos actos morales?, ¿cuál es la relación entre la moral y el derecho?, etc. También denuncia la creciente simonía y corrupción religiosa que se vivía en aquel momento. Por último debemos destacar en esta obra la preocupación de Pascal por dirigir su vida siguiendo dos principios; "No ofender la verdad" y "hablar con discreción".
Presentado por Manuel Fdez. de la Cueva Villalba, Profesor de Filosofía. Traducción, prólogo y edición por el célebre crítico literario Juan Bautista Bergua y Luis¿Ruiz¿Contreras.
About the author
Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 - 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalising the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defence of the scientific method.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and 50 prototypes, he built 20 finished machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) over the following 10 years, establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.
Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo Galilei and Torricelli, in 1647, he rebutted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensees, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In that year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659, he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids. Throughout his life, Pascal was in frail health, especially after the age of 18; he died just two months after his 39th birthday.
