Augustine

« Augustine (AD 354-430) Augustine was the first of the great Christian philosophers.

For well over eight centuries following his death, in fact until the ascendancy of Thomas Aquinas at the end of the thirteenth century, he wasalso the single most influential Christian philosopher.

As a theologian and Church Father, Augustine was the person who did the most to define Christian heresy and so, by implication, to formulate Christian orthodoxy.

Of the threemost prominent heresies defined by Augustine - Donatism, Pelagianism and Manicheism - the latter two also haveespecially important philosophical implications.

In rejecting Pelagianism and its thesis of human perfectibility,Augustine rejected one form of the principle, often associated with Kant, that 'ought' implies 'can', and in rejectingManicheism, with its doctrine that good and evil are equally basic metaphysical realities, Augustine rejected onesolution to the philosophical problem of evil.

The Categories may have been the only work of Aristotle thatAugustine actually read.

Plato he knew somewhat better.

He seems to have been familiar with several Platonicdialogues and he clearly felt a special affinity for Plato and the Platonists, which is particularly evident in De civitate Dei (The City of God) and De vera religione (On True Religion) .

Although he could be said to have responded to classical Greek philosophy in consequential ways, it must be added that what he responded to had been filteredthrough Neoplatonism, Hellenistic scepticism and Stoicism.

It was principally through the writings of Cicero that Augustine became schooled in the opinions of his philosophical predecessors, and it was through the works of theNeoplatonists that he developed his deep appreciation for Plato.

Augustine's philosophy thus draws significantly onthe philosophy of late antiquity as well as on Christian revelation.

Its originality lies partly in its synthesis of Greekand Christian thought, and partly in its development of a novel ego-centred approach to philosophy that anticipates modern thought, especially as exemplified in the philosophy of Descartes.

In his De trinitate (The Trinity) and De civitate Dei , Augustine presents a line of thinking that foreshadows Descartes' famous cogito, ergo sum .

Through his Confessionum libri tredecim (Confessions, more usually known as Confessiones ), the first significant autobiography in Western literature, and also through his Soliloquia (Soliloquies) , which is a dialogue between himself and Reason, Augustine introduced a first-person perspective to Western philosophy.

Early in his career, Augustine found himself attracted to philosophical scepticism.

In his earliest extant work he offers his mostextensive response to the main sceptical arguments of his day, including those that raise the possibility one mightonly be dreaming.

His later responses to scepticism, though less extensive, are better focused; they concentrateon the self-knowledge he considers directly available to each knowing subject, including the knowledge that oneexists.

Taking the first-person perspective one can also develop, he tries to show, in his De trinitate , a convincing argument for mind-body dualism.

But supposing, as he does, that each of us knows from our own case what amind is raises, as Augustine is perhaps the first philosopher to realize, a problem about how one can ever know that there are minds in addition to one's own.

Augustine's account of language and meaning influenced thedevelopment of 'terminist' logic in the high middle ages.

His thoughts on language acquisition in Confessiones provide a foil for Wittgenstein in the latter's Philosophical Investigations .

Yet, some of Augustine's own reflections on ostensive definition in his dialogue De magistro (The Teacher) anticipate Wittgenstein's own views on language learning.

Augustine develops what is described as an 'active' theory of sense perception, according to which raysof vision touch objects whose consequent action on the body is 'noticed' by the mind or soul.

Although his ideas onsense perception are interesting, his most influential epistemological conception is certainly his 'theory ofillumination'.

Instead of supposing that what we know can be abstracted from sensible particulars that instantiatesuch knowledge, he insists that our mind is so constituted as to see 'intelligible realities' directly by an inner illumination.

The modern concept of the will is often said to originate with Augustine.

Certainly the idea of will is central to his philosophy of mind, as well as to his account of sin and the origin of evil.

Strikingly, he usespsychological 'trinities', including the trinity of memory, understanding and will, to illuminate the doctrine of theDivine Trinity, where there is also a baffling unity in plurality.

The theological warrant for this analogy Augustinefinds in the biblical idea that God created human beings, and specifically the human mind, in his own image.Augustine's attempts to achieve a philosophical understanding of theology and religious belief set the frameworkfor much later medieval and early modern philosophy.

On the issue of how reason should bear on religious faith,Augustine develops the idea that reason should work out an understanding of what we must first accept on faith.Yet he also displays a keen sensitivity to those issues most likely to challenge one's religious faith.

Prominentamong his concerns is the philosophical problem of evil, to which he offers what has proved to be perhaps themost influential type of solution.

Particularly striking is Augustine's virtually lifelong preoccupation with humanfreedom and how the fact that human beings are free to make their own choices can be reconciled with theChristian doctrines of God's foreknowledge, predestination and grace.

Almost every important medieval philosopherin the Christian West would later contribute to the continuing effort to achieve a satisfactory reconciliation ofthese issues.

It is significant that Leibniz, who gave the problem of freedom, foreknowledge, predestination and grace one of its most sophisticated treatments, also gave much of his philosophical attention to the equallyAugustinian problem of evil.

Although Augustine did present an argument for the existence of God, it is hisunderstanding of the divine attributes, and especially his insistence on divine 'simplicity', that is, on the idea thatGod is not distinct from his attributes, that has been especially influential on later thinkers.

Also influential are hisvarious attempts to understand the created world.

Augustine made several important efforts, perhaps most notably in the last books of his Confessiones and in his De genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) to give a philosophically sophisticated account of the creation story in the biblical book of Genesis.

His contrastbetween God's eternity and human temporality set the stage for later medieval and modern discussions of theseissues, and his discussion of the nature of time in Book XI of his Confessiones is sometimes taken to epitomize philosophy.

Augustine's descriptions of mystical experience are among the most eloquent in Western literature;they belong among the classic texts of mysticism.

However, Augustine's attempts to understand ritual are perhapsmore remarkable for the directness with which he identifies and confronts difficult issues than for the success ofhis efforts to solve them.

Those efforts seem to be hobbled by his version of mind-body dualism.

Augustine is a thoroughgoing intentionalist in ethics.

This feature of his thought, as well as his unflinching insistence that one can. »