Saint Augustine is sometimes introduced as the first theologian-philosopher, a founder of the Western theologico-philosophical tradition, and a figure who unites two historical times—the Late Antiquity with the Middle Ages—and two different major schools—the Hellenistic philosophy with Christianity. Augustine lives and writes in the era of eudaimonism, teleology and virtue ethics, and he accomplishes, as we will see, a clear shift in the context of these doctrines. In this paper, we reconstruct Augustine’s philosophical approach to human psychology, looking at the (...) elements that bring together a philosophical anthropology, especially by focusing on human agency. Through an interpretative study of De libero arbitrio, we will address concepts such as the soul, freedom of choice, virtue, justice, faith and knowledge, seen as components of action, human freedom, intellect and the will. My main claim is that Augustinian thought and medieval philosophy generally can still offer arguments in practical philosophy as much as they can promote our understanding of moral agency. I intend to revive the interest both in this particular Augustinian work and in the forgotten concept of liberum arbitrium that is introduced and represents Augustine’s idea of a mediator, an arbitrator between reason and the will. (shrink)

Of the many problems which evolutionary theodicy tries to address, the ones of animal suffering and extinction seem especially intractable. In this essay, I show how C. D. Broad's growing block conception of time does much to ameliorate the problems. Additionally, I suggest it leads to another way of understanding the soul. Instead of it being understood as a substance, it is seen as a history—a history which is resurrected in the end times. Correspondingly, redemption, I argue, should not be (...) seen as an event which redeems some future portion of time. God's triumph is over all of history, not just some future temporal portion. (shrink)

Augustine's exposition of the image of God in Book 15 of On The Trinity sheds light on multiple issues that arise in scholarly interpretations of Augustine's account of lying. This essay argues against interpretations that posit a uniform account of lying in Augustine—with the same constitutive features, and insisting both that it is never necessary to tell a lie and that lying is absolutely prohibited. Such interpretations regularly employ intertextual reading strategies that elide distinctions and developments in Augustine's ethics of (...) lying. Instead, I show how looking at texts written prior and subsequent to the texts usually consulted suggests a trajectory in Augustine's thought, beginning with an understanding of lies as morally culpable but potentially necessary, and culminating in a vision of lying as the fundamental evil and the origin of every sin. (shrink)

It is widely thought that Augustine thinks perception is, in some distinctive sense, an active process and that he takes conscious awareness to be constitutive of perception. I argue that conscious awareness is not straightforwardly constitutive of perception and that Augustine is best understood as an indirect realist. I then clarify Augustine’s views concerning the nature and role of diachronically unified conscious awareness and mental representation in perception, the nature of the soul’s intentio, and the precise sense in which perception (...) is an active process. (shrink)

Augustine famously claims every word is a name. Some readers take Augustine to thereby maintain a purely referentialist semantic account according to which every word is a referential expression whose meaning is its extension. Other readers think that Augustine is no referentialist and is merely claiming that every word has some meaning. In this paper, I clarify Augustine’s arguments to the effect that every word is a name and argue that ‘every word is a name’ amounts to the claim that (...) for any word, there exist tokens of that word which are autonymous nouns. Augustine takes this to be the result of universal lexical ambiguity or equivocity and I clarify how Augustine’s account of metalinguistic discourse, which is one of the most detailed to have survived from antiquity, differs from some ancient and modern theories. (shrink)

There are surely few writers who have had a more profound impact on European culture, and in the broadest range of fields, than St. Augustine, and this despite the fact that he was North African. Nonetheless, while Augustine is still called upon in debates on interfaith dialogue and in theological and philosophical disputes, one area of his large corpus has received scant attention—his philosophy of education. Although there are references throughout Augustine’s writings to his philosophy of education, he devotes only (...) a single text to its elaboration—De Magistro—On the Teacher. The fact that this work has been largely overlooked by scholars is disappointing, because the De Magistro, despite its use of theological language, retains a very modern and contemporary thematic with interesting insights for any contemporary theory of education. In this article we provide a primer in reading Augustine’s De Magistro. (shrink)

In "Toward an Augustinian Liberalism," Paul Weithman argues that modern liberal institutions should be concerned with the political vice of pride as a threat to the neutral, legitimate use of public power that liberalism demands. By directing our attention to pride, Weithman attempts to provide an incentive to and foundation for an Augustinian liberalism that can counteract this threat. While Weithman is right to point to the centrality of pride in understanding the modern liberal tradition, an investigation of the early (...) modern reflections on pride in politics reveals a deeper tension between Augustine and modern liberalism than Weithman's analysis acknowledges. This essay discusses this tension by focusing on Hobbes's account of pride and equality in the commonwealth, asking whether Hobbes can be understood as a thinker in the Augustinian political tradition. In order to provide a background on pride as a political vice, this essay contrasts Aristotelian magnanimity with Augustinian humility. Finally, Aquinas's attempt to reintroduce magnanimity into the Augustinian political tradition is considered as a more consistent development of Augustine's thought, thereby revealing more pointedly the tension between Augustine and modern liberalism. By way of conclusion, the possibility of deflating this tension is briefly addressed by considering Jean Bethke Elshtain's discussion of an Augustinian liberalism that does not rely upon a "secular" conception of human nature. (shrink)

The article treats the role of attention in Augustine’s analysis of sense perception, the notion of time, and the Trinitarian structure of the human mind. The term intentio covers a broad range of meanings in Augustine’s usage. Its most fundamental meaning is the life-giving presence of the soul in the body, intensified in attention’s being concentrated on a particular thing or experience; Augustine also uses the term attentio in this latter sense. According to his analysis of time, by way of (...) attention, the soul fixes the present in which the future passes into the past. Due to the intention of the soul, the form abstracted from an external object is both imprinted into the sense organ and retained in the memory in order to be, by intention again, recalled before the sight of mind. As “the intention of the will” or just “the will”, attention connects intellectual understanding with memory. In Augustine’s eyes, attention has a different quality depending on the object it is oriented to, and a different intensity, ranging from inattentive distraction to concentrated effort. (shrink)

Augustine’s theory of first movements has provoked many controversies over the years. When discussing Augustine’s position in preliminary passions, some scholars maintain that he misunderstands the Stoics, whereas some others argue that he grasps their works rather well and his accounts are consistent with Stoic teaching. This article examines how Augustine transforms his predecessors’ conception of first movements into his own theory, with particular focus on whether Augustine misinterprets his predecessor’s doctrine in his approach. The first section introduces the recent (...) disputations on Augustine’s misunderstanding of the Stoic concept of the first movements. The second section compares Augustine’s opinions in his early, middle, and late writings to determine whether changes occur in his interpretation. Based on the above observations, this essay argues that Augustine is familiar with the Stoic doctrines, but in his later works, he ‘deliberately’ deviates from their concept of the first movements in order to refute their ‘pride’ and to defend his Christian position on the psychology of preliminary passions. These deliberate new changes of terms by Augustine do not derive from a misunderstanding, but rather follow from his attempt at constructing a new dynamic theological framework of addressing passions during his later thought. The article concludes with a third section that revisits the modern critiques and responds with a consideration of the significance of Augustine’s views on preliminary passions. (shrink)

The task of this article is a two-fold approach to Augustine’s theory of knowledge, often called that of ‘divine illumination’, with particular attention to one of its seminal sources, his Soliloquia. The first approach is historical- and text-critical; we consider the text of the Soliloquia, its meaning and significance, the questions to which Augustine was implicitly responding at the time, and especially how this work broaches themes which are revisited and further developed in Augustine’s later works. In the second part, (...) we take the results of the foregoing analysis and apply to them a systematic-theological and philosophical method. First we contextualize Augustine’s theory of illumination, both in relation to his own works and beyond. We then argue for a distinction between two senses of illumination, namely ‘principal’ and ‘gradual’, which helps to account for the different ways in which illumination is applied by Augustine. Finally, we show how Augustine’s insights can be relevant to contemporary philosophy and theology, and how his ideas are implicated in contemporary debates. The upshot is an historical, philosophical, and theological consideration of Augustine’s theory of divine illumination, which aspires to strike a balance between doing justice to the text from an historical perspective and interpreting and applying it in the present day. (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é analisar o problema da extensão e do conteúdo da iluminação uma vez que se adote a interpretação regulacionista para a teoria do conhecimento de Agostinho. O regulacionismo, tese defendida por Etienne Gilson, afirma que a iluminação divina do intelecto humano diz respeito ao caráter necessário dos conhecimentos alcançados pela inteligência, e não sobre o conteúdo do conhecimento; assim, a iluminação não teria por função auxiliar na formação de conceitos, mas teria a função de julgar (...) a adequação desses conceitos à verdade. Entretanto, interpretações desse tipo trazem um problema quanto à autonomia cognitiva humana, já que o intelecto seria constrangido externamente em relação ao seu conhecimento. Trataremos, ainda, da crítica sobre a exagerada ênfase na epistemologia que a hipótese regulacionista reverbera. Por fim, e de acordo com o regulacionismo, buscaremos dar uma resposta coerente ao problema da extensão do conhecimento oriundo da iluminação, respeitando tanto a singularidade do raciocínio humano quanto a primazia do conhecimento divino. ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the issue of the extension and the content of the illumination once the regulationist interpretation for the theory of knowledge of Augustine is adopted. Regulationism, a thesis advocated by Etienne Gilson, states that the divine illumination of the human intellect concerns the necessary character of the knowledge attained by intelligence, not the content of knowledge; Thus, illumination would not have it as an auxiliary function in the formation of concepts, but would have the function of judging the adequacy of these concepts to the truth. However, interpretations of this kind bring with it a problem regarding human cognitive autonomy, given the intellect would be constrained externally in relation to its knowledge. We will also deal with the criticism about the exaggerated emphasis on epistemology in which the regulationist hypothesis reverberates. Finally, and according to regulationism, we will seek to give a coherent answer to the issue of the extension of knowledge from illumination, respecting both the uniqueness of human reasoning and the primacy of divine knowledge. (shrink)

In a comparative study of karma theodicy and atonement theodicy, as developed by some Hindu and Christian theologians, this article argues that they present teleological visions where individuals become purged, purified, and perfected in and through their worldly suffering. A karma theodicy operates with the notion that there is some form of proportionality between past evil and present suffering, even if such correlations can only be traced by an enlightened sage or are known to the omniscient God. Christian mystics too (...) seek not so much to explain suffering as to identify suffering with the agony of Christ on the cross, and they envision such suffering as part of a unitive journey where their love of Christ is purified. In these ways, both styles of theodicy use rational resources towards the goal of explanation, while reminding their adherents that the faltering intelligibility that they seek is to be seen as an integral component of their active participation in a sense of theological mystery that enfolds, and yet transcends, their finite existences. (shrink)

The problem St. Augustine confronts in the Confessions is fundamentally one of rhetoric: God should be singularly desirable, yet rhetoric seems necessary to motivate our pursuit of him. Religion participates in the relative marketplace of rhetoric, where ideals need to be authorized because they lack a self-sufficient rationale. In his early encounters with Cicero and the Platonists, Augustine struggles to renounce all such partial ideals in order to pursue philosophical truth unequivocally. Yet the refusal of rhetoric is, paradoxically, another willed (...) ideal authorized by its own rhetoric. Augustine ultimately escapes rhetoric in the conversion scene by demonstrating his inescapable subjection to it; in doing so, he surrenders his will in such a way as to permit God's grace to operate through him. His conversion ultimately results from this inverted humiliation, which forces Augustine to abdicate his ascetic efforts and pretensions. (shrink)

Comparative religious ethics is a complicated scholarly endeavor, striving to harmonize intellectual goals that are frequently conceived as quite different, or even intrinsically opposed. Against commonly voiced suspicions of comparative work, this essay argues that descriptive, comparative, and normative interests may support rather than conflict with each other, depending on the comparison in question, and how it is pursued. On the basis of a brief comparison of the early Christian Augustine of Hippo and the early Confucians Mencius and Xunzi on (...) the topic of "human nature," this paper advocates a particular account of comparative religious ethics, and argues for the complexity of the idea of "human nature." Different elements of this family of concerns are central to religious ethics generally, and to theories and practices of moral development and personal formation specifically. (shrink)

У античкој философској традицији, време је поимано као кинетичка просторност. Св. Августин задржава овакво поимање времена али га такође одређује и као памћење и очекивање, који означују сопство као место пресека вечног и пролазног, које он дефинише као временски простор. Св. Максим Исповедник, ослањајући се на Кападокијске Оце, даје одлучујући допринос конституисању нарочитог хришћанског схватања времена и просторности, сагледавајући га у контексту есхатолошке персоналности. Творевина треба да превазиђе временску и просторну интервалност која истовремено представља услов могућности промене начина постојања творевине (...) кроз ипостасно сједињење са Логосом. Коначну истину творевине св. Максим описује као вечнокрећуће мировање, које представља ипостасно/личносно сједињење са Богом, и тиме личносни преображај спацио темпоралног темеља створених бића. (shrink)