Professor Fritz Bauerschmidt from Loyola will deliver his lecture, Spinoza, Pascal, Style, and Substance

Spinoza and Pascal were contemporaries who both wrote in the wake of the Cartesian revolution in philosophy and science. Yet it is difficult to imagine two works more different in presentation than Spinoza’s Ethics and Pascal’s Pensées: the former a tightly-woven web of definitions, theses, and propositions, and the latter a seemingly random pile of musings. These differences in style are not, however, merely stylistic; they reveal profoundly different ways of thinking and, ultimately, radically different metaphysical and theological visions.