Agnosticism and Religion in Pascal and Hume

There has been a systematic tendency to read Blaise Pascal's Pensees as a preeminently anti-Cartesian work. The work of Francis Kaplan, however, has revealed another reading, which is better suited to the author's original intention and resolves a number of mysteries in his writings. The present contribution concentrates on three points : the first aims to show how Pascal himself organized his work in view of a Christian apologetic based upon facts and not upon philosophical demonstration; the second examines this process in a study made by F. Kaplan in 1989 on Pascal's philosophical agnosticism; the third highlights the relation between true faith and philosophical agnosticism in Pascal and in David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.