Augustine guide

St. Augustine (354-430)

St. Augustine [5] began his life in Algeria, an apt student devoted early to the Church and seeking the Truth. His professors recognized his great skill at philosophizing and writing. As Augustine devoured writings both ancient and of his contemporaries, he fell away from the Church and toward a religious dualism sect known as the Manicheans. His mother, a very devoted Christian (later St. Moni...

Augustine and the Philosophers

Because of the immensity of Augustine’s corpus and the complex intellectual patrimony that informs it, attempts to place him within the history of philosophical traditions are often partial and in need of supplementation. In treating below of Augustine’s engagement with Aristotelianism, Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism, I shall be drawing attention to particular topics, lexical poin...

Augustine on Manichaeism and Charisma

Augustine was suspicious of charismatics‘ claims to superior righteousness, which supposedly authorized them to relay truths about creation and redemption. What follows finds the origins of that suspicion in his disenchantment with celebrities on whom Manichees relied, specialists whose impeccable behavior and intellectual virtuosity were taken as signs that they possessed insight into the mean...

The Philosophy of St. Augustine

Teaching Socrates, Aristotle, and Augustine on Akrasia

A long-standing debate among moral philosophers centers on the question of whether ignorance is always at the root of moral wrongdoing, or whether, in certain cases, wrongdoing stems from something else—namely akrasia. This paper is a discussion of how undergraduate core curriculum teachers can incorporate Augustine’s work into this debate. I begin by briefly reconstructing Socrates’ and Aristo...