Pochybovat, ujišťovat, podrobit se (Filosofický časopis, Mimořádné číslo 3/2024)

In 2023, 400 years have passed since the birth of the French mathematician, philosopher and, above all, Christian Blaise Pascal. On this occasion, a conference entitled Blaise Pascal 400: Doubt, Assert, Surrender was held at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University. The individual contributions show Pascal in dialogue with René Descartes, as the embodiment of the figure of the free spirit in the sense of the "middle" period of Nietzsche's philosophizing, as the inspirer of the existentially oriented philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard and Romano Guardini, as a thinker who is still inspiring today, confronting us with the feeling of "cosmic horror" from the famous fragment of the 72 Thoughts, and as a thinker who is at first seemingly absent from Heidegger's concept of the "history of being", only to later appear in them in the surprising constellation of the epoch "actualitas". Pascal's thinking proves to be alive to this day, in its own way "current" and definitely inspiring.