Abstract

This work is an exploration of the concept of mortality, which attempts to answer the question of what attitude we should have toward death. It attempts this answer, through an alternative reconstruction of Blaise Pascal's lines of thought in his Pensées , which turns its focus on the possibility inherent in life. The themes which we proceed through are: the Pascalian answer to skepticism which issues in a characterization of the process of knowledge emphasizing intuition and to a lesser extent habit, the role of the Wager argument and its connection to the rest of the Pensées , the role of the self in exploring its own mortality, criticism of the main lines of a type of opponent thought best exemplified by the work of Camus, which embraces the concept of death, and finally the role of the Christian God as the proper counter to the concept of death.