Pascalovské meditace

The book Pascal's Meditations (1997) is one of the most important theoretical works of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). In it, the author attempts to look at the totality of his work from a distance and to explicitly elaborate the basic principles that guided his research. The starting point of the book is a critique of "scholastic reason", i.e. an attempt to uncover the social conditions that make all intellectual work possible; the most important of these conditions is the situation of the scholé himself, free from practical pressures. However, according to Bourdieu, professional thinkers, led by philosophers, are usually unaware of the conditionality of their position, and unjustifiably generalize the scholastic vision of the world. This leads to a number of illusions and distortions, in particular a misunderstanding of the peculiar logic of practice and an overly intellectualistic view of human beings. In his "negative philosophy" Bourdieu combats these philosophical errors and, in addition, presents his own conception of man, derived from his sociological research, focusing precisely on those aspects of human existence that are mostly invisible to the scholastic view, such as the role of the body in learning and cognition, the history of reason, or questions of power and violence.