The fourth centenary of the birth of Pascal (1623-2023) is the occasion for numerous symposia, in France and abroad, on his work. And everyone will be scrutinizing Pascal's current relevance : the depth of his analyses of the human psyche, the novelty of his mathematical and physical thinking, the dazzling insights into the relationship between the individual and the group - so many reflections that continue to question our world, sometimes even inviting us to see in Pascal a kind of " prophet ", and which also paint the portrait of a perpetual Pascal - as we speak of perpetual motion - a Pascal, after all, almost in the present, whose perenniality would be infinitely renewed and renewable.
But Pascal also emerges from fractures : the fracture of the closed world of medieval science, the theological fracture between Augustinism and Molinism at the time of the Protestant and Catholic reforms, the political fracture at the time of the establishment of absolutism, the philosophical fracture around Descartes, the aesthetic fracture when the Writer was born. Reflecting on the beliefs and knowledge of his time (on the Jews or heliocentrism, for example), provocative in its disdain for science, its call for a militant lay vocation within the Church, its apparent anti-humanism set against man's claim " to make himself the center of himself " (fr. 182) or " to make himself God " (fr. 510), Pascal's work is itself, through its moral demands, divisive and far more problematic than the admiration for his genius, forgetting or trivializing the epithet " effrayant " that Chateaubriand attached to him, often concedes. It has, moreover, aroused the exasperation of Voltaire and Paul Valéry, who reject the postulates on which it is based.
More generally, Pascal's reflections on truth, belief and wagering are inopportune. They are at the heart of debates on the epistemology of religious belief, decision theory, and the new forms taken by the skeptical challenge in contemporary philosophy of knowledge, as well as in ethics and metaphysics.
Against all critical unanimity and the generally observed division between philosophers and literary scholars, this symposium, organized at the Collège de France by Claudine Tiercelin (chair Metaphysics and Philosophy of Knowledge) in collaboration with Laurence Plazenet (professor at the University of Clermont-Auvergne, director of the Centre international Blaise-Pascal (IHRIM, UMR 5317, president of the Société des Amis de Port-Royal) would like to take a two-pronged approach to this untimely Pascal, untimely in that he clashes with our representations, goes against the grain of his own contemporaries, chooses brilliance and brilliance over conciliation, just as he opposes scholastic rhetoric and copia, incompleteness and fragments, the art of suspension and persuasion to dogmatic demonstration.