The French thinker Blaise Pascal was not only a gifted scientist, but also an author of many brilliant essays on man and God, which later inspired many philosophers and theologians. The aim of the article is to show the role the idea of human finitude played in Pascal’s thinking. It outlines Pascal’s specific understanding of the possibilities and limits of the essential human ability, namely thinking rationally, as well as the ontological-temporal aspect of human finitude – the problem of death and mortality. Further, it examines the central concepts of Pascal’s Pensées (among them thinking, dignity, diversion, boredom) and clarifies his conception of man as a thinking reed. Pascal’s essays are presented here as based on his creative reception of previous philosophical and religious thinking (stoicism, M. de Montaigne, St. Augustin, church fathers, R. Descartes and others), and also as an important inspiration for the authors of later centuries (e.g. dialectical thinking, philosophy of existence and existentialism etc.).
According to Martin Heidegger’s “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics”, the work of the philosopher from Königsberg should be read not as an epistemological treatise, but as essentially concerning the conditions of possibility of metaphysics, or strictly speaking: as making proper metaphysics possible through the proper metaphysics of Dasein. Heidegger is also answering one more demanding question: how is the transcendental account itself possible? Both issues find their explanation in the very essence of Dasein’s finitude, which appears to be posited in Kant’s critique long before Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. This paper contains an indication of the two main problems strictly connected with the finitude of Dasein: (1) revocation of a dissonance between an epistemological domain and its transcendence, which are regulative things-in-themselves; (2) revocation of an independence of truth from its ontological source, i.e. from Dasein. We take a closer look at the following: the problem of transcendence (outer world transcendence of otherness vs. inner world transcendence of difference), the problem of Das Nichts' significance to the finitude issue, the Kantian thought experiment concerning the Absolute’s pure intuition, the significance of that experiment for establishing proof of the finitude of Dasein, as well as for specifying the finitude of Dasein’s essence, and the thesis on the finiteness of ontic cognition and infinitude of ontological understanding.
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