Pascal's wager
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"This singularly modern idea—which resurges periodically in later philosophy, for example in Kant's conception of the 'ideas' of reason, in Kierkegaard's notion of the 'leap' of faith, in neo-Marxist theory of praxis" --A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein |
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Pascal's Wager (or Pascal's Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should "wager" as though God exists, because so living has potentially everything to gain, and certainly nothing to lose. It was set out in note 233 of his Pensées, a posthumously published collection of notes made by Pascal in his last years as he worked on a treatise on Christian apologetics.
Historically, Pascal's Wager, groundbreaking as it had charted new territory in probability theory, was one of the first attempts to make use of the concept of infinity, marked the first formal use of decision theory, and anticipated the future philosophies of pragmatism and voluntarism.
See also
- A Confession
- Appeal to consequences
- Atheist's Wager
- Christian existential apologetics
- Decision theory
- Ecclesiastes
- Existentialism
- Game theory
- Pascal's mugging
- Pensées
