Abstract

Blaise Pascal's significant legacy to the French Enlightenment is well known. Voltaire dedicates the 25th of his Philosophical Letters to him; Diderot mentions him indirectly, but unequivocally, in the title of his first speculative writing, Philosophical Thoughts (1745). In Rousseau's case, the controversy with the Archbishop of Beaumont exposes what separates him from Jansenism - but also what links him to Pascal, namely the use of dualistic categories such as nature and history, principle and process, being and ought to be. In turn, Rousseau was taken by Kant as the "Newton of morality" as early as the 1760s. In this article, I intend to examine whether there are conceptual elements common to Pascal, Rousseau and Kant around the dual conception they adopt to characterize the human condition and its relationship with praxis.