"Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true," declared Pascal in his Penseés. "The cure for this," he explained, "is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is." Motivated by the 17th-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity, in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. While Pascal's untimely death prevented his completion of the work, these fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Penseés remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. Introduction by T. S. Eliot.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the giant phenomenologist of his time in the entire French-speaking world. He is not an epistemologist nor a moralist. For him, the beginning of the beginning is human flesh; the flesh becomes word, the word becomes flesh, and both die. There is science, and there is experience/perception. The mother is the latter. They aren't contradictory, but complete and depend on each other. With regard to language, for him, there are words, and there is grammar. A word is never empty, but carries its own weight; even a lie is full of meaning. Liberty resides in grammar, an individual function and independent from books. It's in the grammar where singularity lives. Thinking and talking are the same. Wherever there is human life, there is meaning, and that is irrespective of age, culture, religion, education or social position. Merleau-Ponty is not a Marxist nor a communist. According to him, history is blind; it has no mind. He also finds a flaw in Freudianism. Flesh is an infinite universe full of stars and black holes. Following Merleau-Ponty, verity is devoiler, and devoiler is verity, but verity is never absolute. One must take a step back. There is light and there is shadow; they never coincide in human life. The shadow is always first, and no matter how one tries to run, he will never catch his shadow.

This eloquent and philosophically astute translation is the first complete English translation based on the Sellier edition of Pascal's manuscript, widely accepted as the manuscript that is closest to the version Pascal left behind on his death in 1662. A brief history of the text, a select bibliography of primary and secondary sources, a chronology of Pascal’s life and works, concordances between the Sellier and Lafuma editions of the original, and an index are provided.

This book proposes a new phenomenological analysis of the questions of perception and cognition which are of paramount importance for a better understanding of those processes which underlies the formation of knowledge and consciousness. It presents many clear arguments showing how a phenomenological perspective helps to deeply interpret most fundamental findings of current research in neurosciences and also in mathematical and physical sciences.

This book considers the manifold possible approaches, past and present, to our understanding of the natural numbers. They are treated as epistemic objects: mathematical objects that have been subject to epistemological inquiry and attention throughout their history and whose conception has evolved accordingly. Although they are the simplest and most common mathematical objects, as this book reveals, they have a very complex nature whose study illuminates subtle features of the functioning of our thought. Using jointly history, mathematics and philosophy to grasp the essence of numbers, the reader is led through their various interpretations, presenting the ways they have been involved in major theoretical projects from Thales onward. Some pertain primarily to philosophy (as in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein...), others to general mathematics (Euclid's Elements, Cartesian algebraic geometry, Cantorian infinities, set theory...). Also serving as an introduction to the works and thought of major mathematicians and philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Cantor, Dedekind, Frege, Husserl and Weyl, this book will be of interest to a wide variety of readers, from scholars with a general interest in the philosophy or mathematics to philosophers and mathematicians themselves.