Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Oppy, Graham

Titel

Wagering on an Ironic God: Pascal on Faith and Philosophy by Thomas S. Hibbs (review)

Ist Teil von

• Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2018-04, Vol.56 (2), p.372-373

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]the “rereading” that we are given (145–62) entirely ignores the paragraphs in which Pascal invents decision theory and applies it to the question of whether or not to wager on God. [...]perhaps unsurprisingly, the “rereading” also ignores the secondary literature on the decision-theoretic arguments, including, among others, key works by Ian Hacking, R. Antony Duff, Alan Hájek, and Paul Bartha. According to Hibbs, the many gods objection fails because Pascal defends a wager on the Christian God rather than a “generic wager” on a “generic God.” While it is not always easy to tell what is merely being attributed to Pascal and what is also being owned by the author, I think that it is fairly safe to say that the author believes things like the following: “the weight of our desires is rooted in an ineradicable and unquenchable desire for the infinite, for a happiness that cannot be lost, and fulfils all our longings” (131); “what typifies our condition is the apparently systematic subversion of higher, properly human capacities by lower, subhuman powers and drives” (118); something is deeply awry in the human condition; human life has the structure of a quest; the deepest longing of the human heart is the longing for transcendence; the art of dying well is lost to those who seek diversion in order to escape from boredom, anxiety and inconstancy; and so on.