PHL 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Blaise Pascal, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Decision Matrix
4 Dec 2020
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Born in 1623 in clermont-ferrand in france, son of a royal official. The machine went through over fifty prototypes before being patented. Pascal also strongly opposed one of the tenets of aristotelian science, namely that "nature abhors a vacuum. " (the famous horror vacui thesis) Descartes had said this was true a priori. Torricelli had conducted an experiment whereby when a tube filled with mercury was turned upside down in a basin of the same substance, an apparently empty space appeared at the end of the tube. Pascal worked for four years, repeating the experiments with the help of an engineer. He concluded that the horror vacui thesis was incorrect and furthermore succeeded in establishing the fact of atmospheric pressure. Pascal made major contributions to the study of probability in mathematics. His wager argument is seen as foundational for decision theory" - the theory of choices made when each option is associated with a risk, or expectation of gain or loss.
