Augustine's Inner Dialogue


Book Description

Augustine's philosophy of life involves mediation, reviewing one's past and exercises for self-improvement. Centuries after Plato and before Freud he invented a 'spiritual exercise' in which every man and woman is able, through memory, to reconstruct and reinterpret life's aims. In this 2010 book, Brian Stock examines Augustine's unique way of blending literary and philosophical themes. He proposes a new interpretation of Augustine's early writings, establishing how the philosophical soliloquy (soliloquium) has emerged as a mode of inquiry and how it relates to problems of self-existence and self-history. The book also provides clear analysis of inner dialogue and discourse and how, as inner dialogue complements and finally replaces outer dialogue, a style of thinking emerges, arising from ancient sources and a religious attitude indebted to Judeo-Christian tradition.




The Cambridge Companion to Augustine


Book Description

This second edition of the Companion has been thoroughly revised and updated with eleven new chapters and a new bibliography.




On the Trinity


Book Description

The following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason. Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural human wit and diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. Aeterna Press




Augustine and the Dialogue


Book Description

Contrary to the scholarly consensus, Augustine and the Dialogue argues that Augustine's dialogues, with their inconclusive debates and dramatic shifts in focus, betray a sophisticated pedagogical method which combines strategies for 'un-learning' and self-reflection with a willingness to proceed via provisional answers. By shifting the focus from doctrinal content to questions of method, Kenyon seeks to reframe scholarly discussions of Augustine's earliest surviving body of works. This approach shows the young Augustine not refuting so much as appropriating Academic skeptical practices. It also shows that the dialogues' few scriptural references, e.g. Wisdom 11:20's 'measure, number, weight', come at key structural points. This helps articulate the dialogues' larger project of cultivating virtue and their approach to philosophy as a form of purification. Augustine is shown to be at home with pluralistic approaches, and Kenyon holds up his methodology as an attractive model for thinking through problems of the liberal academy today.




The Integrated Self


Book Description

Well before his entry into the religious life in the spring of 386 C.E., Augustine had embarked on a lengthy comparison between teachings on the self in the philosophical traditions of Platonism and Neoplatonism and the treatment of the topic in the Psalms, the letters of St. Paul, and other books of the Bible. Brian Stock argues that Augustine, over the course of these reflections, gradually abandoned a dualistic view of the self, in which the mind and the body play different roles, and developed the notion of an integrated self, in which the mind and body function interdependently. Stock identifies two intellectual techniques through which Augustine effected this change in his thought. One, lectio divina, was an early Christian approach to reading that engaged both mind and body. The other was a method of self-examination that consisted of framing an interior Socratic dialogue between Reason and the individual self. Stock investigates practices of writing, reading, and thinking across a range of premodern texts to demonstrate how Augustine builds upon the rhetorical traditions of Cicero and the inner dialogue of Plutarch to create an introspective and autobiographical version of self-study that had little to no precedent. The Integrated Self situates these texts in a broad historical framework while being carefully attuned to what they can tell us about the intersections of mind, body, and medicine in contemporary thought and practice. It is a book in which Stock continues his project of reading Augustine, and one in which he moves forward in new and perhaps unexpected directions.




Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self


Book Description

In this book, Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented the concept of the self as a private inner space-a space into which one can enter and in which one can find God. Although it has often been suggested that Augustine in some way inaugurated the Western tradition of inwardness, this is the first study to pinpoint what was new about Augustine's philosophy of inwardness and situate it within a narrative of his intellectual development and his relationship to the Platonist tradition. Augustine invents the inner self, Cary argues, in order to solve a particular conceptual problem. Augustine is attracted to the Neoplatonist inward turn, which located God within the soul, yet remains loyal to the orthodox Catholic teaching that the soul is not divine. He combines the two emphases by urging us to turn "in then up"--to enter the inner world of the self before gazing at the divine Light above the human mind. Cary situates Augustine's idea of the self historically in both the Platonist and the Christian traditions. The concept of private inner self, he shows, is a development within the history of the Platonist concept of intelligibility or intellectual vision, which establishes a kind of kinship between the human intellect and the divine things it sees. Though not the only Platonist in the Christian tradition, Augustine stands out for his devotion to this concept of intelligibility and his willingness to apply it even to God. This leads him to downplay the doctrine that God is incomprehensible, as he is convinced that it is natural for the mind's eye, when cleansed of sin, to see and understand God. In describing Augustine's invention of the inner self, Cary's fascinating book sheds new light on Augustine's life and thought, and shows how Augustine's position developed into the more orthodox Augustine we know from his later writings.




Religious Polemics and Encounters in Late Antiquity


Book Description

Religious Polemics and Encounters in Late Antiquity: Boundaries, Conversions, and Persuasion explores the intricate identity formation and negotiations of early encounters of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). It explores the ever-pressing challenges arising from polemical inter-religious encounters by analyzing the dynamics of apologetic debate, the negotiation and formation of boundaries of belonging, and the argumentative thrust for persuasion and conversion, as well as the outcomes of these various encounters, including the articulation of novel ideas. The Late Antique authors studied in the present volume represent a variety of voices from North Africa, passing through Rome, to Palestine. Together, these voices of the past offer invaluable insight to shape the present times, in hope for a better future.




Augustine and Academic Skepticism


Book Description

Among the most important, but frequently neglected, figures in the history of debates over skepticism is Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE). His early dialogue, Against the Academics, together with substantial material from his other writings, constitutes a sustained attempt to respond to the tradition of skepticism with which he was familiar. This was the tradition of Academic skepticism, which had its home in Plato's Academy and was transmitted to the Roman world through the writings of Cicero (106–43 BCE). Augustine and Academic Skepticism is the first comprehensive treatment of Augustine’s critique of Academic skepticism. In clear and accessible prose, Blake D. Dutton presents that critique as a serious work of philosophy and engages with it precisely as such. While Dutton provides an extensive review of Academic skepticism and Augustine’s encounter with it, his primary concern is to articulate and evaluate Augustine’s strategy to discredit Academic skepticism as a philosophical practice and vindicate the possibility of knowledge against the Academic denial of that possibility. In doing so, he sheds considerable light on Augustine’s views on philosophical inquiry and the acquisition of knowledge.




Psychology at the Turn of the Millennium, Volume 2


Book Description

These two volumes represent the cutting edge of contemporary theory and research in psychological science. Based on the keynote and state-of-the-art lectures from the 27th International Congress of Psychology, the volumes feature a collection of chapters written by international leaders in psychological scholarship. The chapters reflect the diversity of current research topics in psychology, where old boundaries have become obsolete and subdivisions from the past merge to form new objects of study. Volume 1 addresses cognitive, biological, and health perspectives. It includes sections on the neural mechanisms underlying psychological processes; the core areas in experimental psychology, perception, attention, learning, and memory; the multiple aspects of psychological health; the interaction between cognitive and emotional processes; and higher cognitive processes with special focus on decision-making and language. Volume 2 deals with social, developmental, and clinical perspectives. The sections highlight human development across the life span; basic and applied issues in personality, emotion, and clinical psychology; social psychology, ranging from experimental work through social constructivism; and gender.




The T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology


Book Description

A companion to the influence of St Augustin on modern theology and the response to his work from contemporary thinkers.