In 7.6 you read a selection from Pascal’s “The Wager”, in which he gives an argument for the claim that it is rational to believe in God even if we do not have evidence that God exists. (a) Explain Pascal’s argument and then (b) explain an objection to Pascal’s argument.
In 7.6, you read a selection from W.K. Clifford’s article “Ethics of Belief”. Clifford believes that thinking critically about our beliefs is not simply an effective practice–he contends that it is our moral responsibility. He says, “But if the belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure [of the belief] is a stolen one…because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind”. Explain why Clifford thinks it is our duty to mankind to form beliefs only on sufficient evidence. In answering this question, you will need to explain what Clifford argues happens when people believe without evidence.
Sample Solution
a shout.] Yes!” (317) Although Krapp at other moments remembers women’s eyes, this particular evocation begins slowly and accelerates until it arrives at the ejaculatory “Yes!”, trumpeting in its list of the transcendent contents of the eyes and in its rhythmic crescendo and arrival the effect of the involuntary memory on Krapp’s psyche—he is a changed man. Proust’s salvific involuntary memory finds a place in Beckett’s theatre, rendering it, once understood, far less absurd than some would suggest. Seeing Krapp’s Last Tape in perfomance reinforces the more positive perception of the play’s conclusion. In the version found in Beckett on Film, starring John Hurt directed by Atom Egoyan, after Krapp has heard the account of the episode on the punt, Krapp hugs the tape recorder in addition to his other recognitions of the transcendence of the moment. At the end of the play, as the tape ends, Krapp continues to hug the tape recorder clearly transported by “the performance of its miracle” (Beckett, Proust 34). In this version, the passivity suggesting despair demanded by the stage directions at the end transforms into a meaningfulness lacking in Krapp’s other memories. The physical gesture of the hug adds dramatic weight to, embodies, the words, most of which are disembodied and so diminished on stage. In Krapp’s Last Tape then, Samuel Beckett transposes the route to salvation he finds in Proust’s fiction into his own dramatic expression. While at first glance the play offers a vision of despair (or even at second, third, or fourth glance, stupidly ignoring hints offered freely), in truth Beckett, while as always acknowledging a>
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