Traditione e modernita in Blaise Pascal / Tradition and Modernity in Blaise Pascal’s Philosophy

Abstract

The relation tradition-modernity, which seems to play a specific role of dichotomy conflict in seventeenth century, in the name of the autonomy of modern science, knows a balance in Blaise Pascal. The philosopher-scientist from Clermont-Ferrand, who heavily contributed, by his researches in physics, to the progress of the experimental science, even acknowledging the limits of traditional knowledge, does nott condemn its value.

To Préface sur le Traité du Vide, written by Pascal in 1648, where the roles, distinct but not opposite, of tradition and modernity are outlined, follows a rescue of the role of imagination and of coutume in Pascal’s thought, two perverted and double-faced powers which can serve truth: a truth which can be achieved when habit becomes tradition, a truth which can be built when imagination works as faculty of models.