The Hidden God : A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine

Dialogues concerning natural religion -- Hume's Dialogues on evil / Stanley Tweyman -- Going out the window : a comment on Tweyman / John W. Davis -- Comments on Tweyman and Davis / George Nathan -- Commentary on Professor Tweyman's 'Hume on evil' / P.S. Wadia. The concept of ‘world visions', first elaborated in the early work of Georg Lukàcs, is used here as a tool whereby the similarities between Pascal's Pensées and Kant's critical philosophy are contrasted with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Lucien Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the ‘tragic vision'marked an important phase in the development of European thought from rationalism and empiricism to the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukàcs. The book is not a collection of isolated essays on Kant, Pascal, Racine, the status of the legal nobility in seventeenth-century France and the exact nature of the religious movement known as Jansenism, but an attempt to formulate, by an examination of these different topics, a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society. This book provides a reasoned, comprehensive understanding of what religion is as well as a clear and critical assessment of whether, in the light of modern developments in philosophy, contemporary thinking people can responsibly maintain religious belief in God. The book is divided into three major sections: the first deals with what all religions may be said to have in common; the second discusses theistic religion and the issue of intellectually responsible belief in God; the third examines current developments within a particular .. This original study, published initially in 1959, introduces students of philosophy and of theology to a treatment of religion based upon the methods of modern philosophy ' particularly logical empiricism and existentialism. Above and beyond the importance of its point of view, this book is distinguished by its clarity and by its objective and understanding presentation of diverse points of view