Jonathan Egid at Literary Review:
I am precisely the target audience for this small book on the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Although I work on 17th-century philosophy (in a quite different part of the world, in my defence), I knew next to nothing about Pascal save for those things named after him – the unit of pressure, the triangle of binomial coefficients, the famous wager – before starting Compagnon’s elegant, unconventional ‘beach read’.
Years ago, I bought a copy of Pascal’s Pensées in one of those beautiful old Penguin Classics editions, but the image of his stark white plaster death mask set against an all-black background rather scared me off opening it up. A similarly foreboding impression was provided by the one sentence of his that I remembered, from an epigraph in A W Moore’s The Infinite: ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’
more here.
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