• Part One


• 1: Introduction


• 2: Contexts


• 3: The Uses of Philosophy


• 4: Belief, Reason, Persuasion, Faith


• 5: Order and Disorder


• 6: Futility and Wretchedness


• 7: Reasons for the Irrational


• 8: Human Greatness


• 9: Contradictions


• 10: The Fall


• 11: Self


• Part Two


• 12: Diversion


• 13: Happiness


• 14: 'The Plan of his Whole Work'


• Part Three


• 15: The Need to Seek for God


• 16: The Claims and Limits of Reason


• 17: Transition


• 18: True and False Religions: the Singularity of Christianity


• 19: The Order of Charity


• 20: The Wager


• 21: Conclusion

Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He works chiefly on the literature and thought of the early modern period. His publications include Early Modern French Thought (Oxford 2003), Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves (Oxford 2006), and Disguised Vices (Oxford 2011). He is co-editor of The Camswinbridge History of French Thought (2019), and he has translated René Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy and The Passions on the Soul for the Oxford World's Classics series. Moriarty is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Michael Moriarty presents the deepest and broadest study for many years of Blaise Pascal's philosophy and theology, as represented in his Pensées, a seminal work in the development of modern thought. Central themes are the distinction between faith and reason, the contradictions within human nature, and the relation between mind and body.