Pascal: Adversary and Advocate

The life of the paradoxical seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician is examined here along three axes--psychological, theological, and linguistic--to present the first rounded portrayal of the querulous, intense, ever-committed Pascal. In drawing this portrait, the author restores Pascal to the general reader after twenty years of scholarship that has embroiled this historic thinker in academic quarrels. Through the scrutiny of Pascal's biography and analysis of the entire body of his writing, Nelson reveals Pascal the man, the scientist, the theologian, and the literary genius.