Playing with truth : language and the human condition in Pascal's Pensées
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Bibliographic Information
Playing with truth : language and the human condition in Pascal's Pensées
（Oxford modern languages and literature monographs）
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1994
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Note
Bibliography: p. [230]-242
Includes indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Pascal's Pensees is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest masterpieces of seventeenth-century France, an unfinished work which has both inspired and perplexed readers in succeeding centuries.
Playing with Truth is the first comprehensive book on Pascal to be devoted to his use of key terms depicting the central subject of the Pensees, the human condition. Nicholas Hammond explores such fundamental notions as language and order, proceeding with a detailed analysis of the words inconstance, ennui, inquietude, bonheur, felicite, and justice. Developing and challenging the most recent scholarship about the text, Hammond identifies
the crucial notion of play (as exemplified in the term divertissement) which underlies all these words and applies his findings to the notoriously unstable concept of truth. Through the fragmentary nature of the Pensees and the shifting meaning of terms, Pascal is shown to be deliberately engaging the reader in a game to make sense of the text.
Giving an in-depth account of a many important critical controversies of the day, as well as offering a novel and provocative insight into the persuasive purpose of the Pensees, this study will be of interest to specialist and undergraduate readers alike.
Table of Contents
- Introduction - etat present, terminology, de l'esprit geometrique and Port-Royal. Part 1 Language and order in the "Pensees": language in the "Pensees" - parole/mot, the tyranny of speech - dire/contredire, interpretation
- ordre - ordonner, order and fragmentation, L532 - "le veritable ordre", ordre as dispositio, memoria, order, truth and language. Part 2 La condition de l'homme: inconstance - inconstance et bizarrerie, inconstant/constant, constance
- ennui - ennui/neant, ennui and divertissement, ennui and the possibility of salvation
- inquietude - the anxiety of man's fallen state, inquietude and curiosite, inquietude and continued spiritual endeavour
- repos - pyrrhonism and stoicism - tranquilite, paix, human repos, spiritual repos
- bonheur/felicite - sur la conversion du pecheur, false happiness, happiness and divertissement, spiritual happiness
- justice - injustice, human justice, natural justice, political justice, les justes, divine justice, Christ as mediator. Part 3 Playing with truth: truth and play, verite, truth and corruption, raison des effets, figures and miracles.
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