Descartes, Hobbes, and Pascal

Descartes, Hobbes, and Pascal

During the 17th and 18th century, religion, religious beliefs and most of all the

religious leaders played a very influential role in the direction of politics. This was also a

time when religion and politics played a large role in the direction of what was accepted

as a result of the new discoveries in the natural sciences and in a time when there were

some very influential writers, philosophers, scientists and mathematicians. At the time,

these people were considered to be very radical and revolutionary because of some of

their beliefs and this often times led them to be highly scrutinized, criticized and

sometimes even punished by the legal system. Now in the 21st century, these views that

were considered to be radical and even ridiculous at that time are now considered to be

brilliant revelations written by ingenious individuals. It would be very interesting to see

how some of these individuals would feel about the progress of the planet in which they

helped to inspire and how they might feel about some more recent issues concerning the

direction of humanity in the late 20th century, as I shall further discuss in this paper.

In this class we have discussed about many philosophical writers of the 17th and

18th century and in this paper I shall discuss some of the opinions written about the

following document; Renee Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), Thomas Hobbes’

Leviathan (1651), Blaise Pascal’s Thoughts (1670) and Jacques Bossuet’s Politics +

Scriptures (1679).

First I am going to talk about Renee Descartes and the subjects that he would

discuss at a dinner party hosted by me. Renee Descartes was the father of modern

philosophy, a great scientist and also ...

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...otect their boundaries or beliefs. He was also

very disappointed to see that people don’t believe in God as much as people used to in

the past. He knew that this was the worst thing about the 20th century because there is

no way for people to enjoy peace without God’s protection.

As you have read, all of these thinkers were great philosophers who still believe

what they were taught in their early years. All of them defended their point of view and

agreed that science was definitely changing the way people thought. This is a fact

because as the church and science have separated, everything changed dramatically. The

church lost a lot of power and science was the big gainer. It was really a pleasure to have

such great philosophers to see their views about the 20th century and hopefully we can

use their comments for us to live in a better future.