The Sin of Heresy: Opposition to Heresy in Augustine’s Confessions

Throughout the Confessions, Augustine repeatedly complains about heresy with a special focus on the heresy he once belonged to, Manicheanism. To those of us who live in a culture in which respectable people rarely, if ever, care about religious orthodoxy to such a degree, these complaints seem rather bizarre. Despite this initial appearance, Augustine presents in the Confessions several plausible reasons for thinking heresy is sinful and, therefore, detrimental to a person’s sanctity and ultimate salvation. In this paper, I argue that Augustine considers heresy sinful because it involves as many as three kinds of idolatry: loving a lie/false conception of God instead of the true God, loving one’s own beliefs more than the Truth, which is God, and loving the worldly praise one receives from developing novel opinions more than God.     

Spiritual Exercises in Augustine’s Confessions

Confessions, the narrative of Augustine’s spiritual journey, has been a source of inspiration to readers through many centuries. It addresses the universal striving of the individual towards a ‘way of living’ characterized by internal coherence and an experience of the transcendent. Augustine, using a method of inquiry and engagement, guides the reader through some fundamental exercises: remembering one’s story; facing inner restlessness; entering into dialogue with God; ordering of human love; centering in Christ; participating in a community of faith; living as a pilgrim. Together, they constitute a didactic instrument for the spiritual development of his readers. This paper reconstructs that central purpose in a coherent and practical model.     

A Book to Think With: Margaret Miles’ Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter

Margaret Miles’ work with Augustine’s Confessions offers a model for a “philosophical life,” a term used in an earlier century for a life focused on seeking wisdom. As Miles reviews her life, she traces how she has come to see in all the particularity of her experience “what really exists.” She shares many scenes from her life, but most striking is her frank exploration of sexual experience in its complexities as a doorway to the kind of knowing that leads us to gratitude. She found Plotinus’ understanding of what really exists as the “surround-love of the All” most useful. This review describes how her autobiography permits fresh thinking and talking about God among those of us with a modern worldview.     

The Guise of the Bad in Augustine’s Pear Theft

In the second book of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo presents his famous juvenile Pear Theft as an apparent case of acting under the guise of the bad. At least since Thomas Aquinas’ influential interpretation, scholars have usually taken Augustine’s detailed discussion of the case to be dispelling this “guise of the guise of the bad”, and to offer a solid “guise of the good”-explanation. This paper addresses an important challenge to this view: Augustine offers two different “guise of the good”-explanations in his text rather than just one, and the two explanations seem to be mutually exclusive. A number of more recent attempts to reconcile Augustine’s two lines of explanation are discussed and found wanting, and a new suggestion is made. The proposed solution focuses on the Pear Theft as a joint action, and it departs from the Aquinian interpretation in that it accounts for a way in which the “guise of the bad”-hypothesis survives the explanation.     

Meno’s paradox and medicine

The measurement of diagnostic accuracy is an important aspect of the evaluation of diagnostic tests. Sometimes, medical researchers try to discover the set of observations that are most accurate of all by directly inspecting diseased and not-diseased patients. This method is perhaps intuitively appealing, as it seems a straightforward empirical way of discovering how to identify diseased patients, which amounts to trying to correlate the results of diagnostic tests with disease status. I present three examples of researchers who try to produce definitive diagnostic criteria by directly inspecting diseased and not diseased patients. Despite this method’s intuitive appeal, I will argue that it is impossible to carry out. Before researchers can inspect these patients to discover definitive diagnostic criteria, they must be able to distinguish diseased and not-diseased patients; and they do not know how to do this, because this is what they are trying to discover. I suspect the intuitive appeal of directly inspecting patients makes this difficult to appreciate. To counter this difficulty, I present this problem as a manifestation of ‘Meno’s paradox’, which was described in classical antiquity, and of ‘the problem of nomic measurement’, described more recently. Considering these philosophical problems may help researchers address the methodological issues they face when evaluating diagnostic tests.

     

A Principled Solution to Fitch’s Paradox

To save antirealism from Fitchs Paradox, Tennant has proposed to restrict the scope of the antirealist principle that all truths are knowable to truths that can be consistently assumed to be known. Although the proposal solves the paradox, it has been accused of doing so in an ad hoc manner. This paper argues that, first, for all Tennant has shown, the accusation is just; second, a restriction of the antirealist principle apparently weaker than Tennants yields a non-ad hoc solution to Fitchs Paradox; and third, the alternative is only apparently weaker than, and even provably equivalent to, Tennants. It is thereby shown that the latter is not ad hoc after all.     

Grelling’s Paradox

Grelling’s Paradox is the paradox which results from considering whether heterologicality, the word-property which a designator has when and only when the designator does not bear the word-property it designates, is had by ‘ ȁ8heterologicality’. Although there has been some philosophical debate over its solution, Grelling’s Paradox is nearly uniformly treated as a variant of either the Liar Paradox or Russell’s Paradox, a paradox which does not present any philosophical challenges not already presented by the two better known paradoxes. The aims of this paper are, first, to offer a precise formulation of Grelling’s Paradox which is clearly distinguished from both the Liar Paradox and Russell’s Paradox; second, to offer a solution to Grelling’s Paradox which both resolves the paradoxical reasoning and accounts for unproblematic predications of heterologicality; and, third, to argue that there are two lessons to be drawn from Grelling’s Paradox which have not yet been drawn from the Liar or Russell’s Paradox. The first lesson is that it is possible for the semantic content of a predicate to be sensitive to the semantic context; i.e., it is possible for a predicate to be an indexical expression. The second lesson is that the semantic content of an indexical predicate, though unproblematic for many cases, can nevertheless be problematic in some cases.     

Yablo’s Paradox in Second-Order Languages: Consistency and Unsatisfiability

Stephen Yablo [23,24] introduces a new informal paradox, constituted by an infinite list of semi-formalized sentences. It has been shown that, formalized in a first-order language, Yablo’s piece of reasoning is invalid, for it is impossible to derive falsum from the sequence, due mainly to the Compactness Theorem. This result casts doubts on the paradoxical character of the list of sentences. After identifying two usual senses in which an expression or set of expressions is said to be paradoxical, since second-order languages are not compact, I study the paradoxicality of Yablo’s list within these languages. While non-paradoxical in the first sense, the second-order version of the list is a paradox in our second sense. I conclude that this suffices for regarding Yablo’s original list as paradoxical and his informal argument as valid.     

Three Abductive Solutions to the Meno Paradox – with Instinct, Inference, and Distributed Cognition

This article analyzes three approaches to resolving the classical Meno paradox, or its variant, the learning paradox, emphasizing Charles S. Peirce’s notion of abduction. Abduction provides a way of dissecting those processes where something new, or conceptually more complex than before, is discovered or learned. In its basic form, abduction is a “weak” form of inference, i.e., it gives only tentative suggestions for further investigation. But it is not too weak if various sources of clues and restrictions on the abductive search are taken into account. We present three, complementary versions of abduction: (1) as a sort of guessing instinct or expert-like intuition, where unconscious clues are important; (2) as a form of inference, where a strategic point of view is essential; and (3) as a part of distributed cognition and mediated activity, where the interaction with the material, social, and cultural environment is emphasized. Our starting point is Peirce’s own notion of abduction, but we broaden the perspective, especially to the direction of distributed cognition.     

The Prodigal Son: Some Psychological Aspects of Augustine’s Conversion to Christianity

Augustine’s conversion is considered exemplary for its Christian testimony. However, the psychological aspects are also relevant, for Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was as much inspired by personal and cultural ambitions as by religious convictions. For Augustine, the conversion to the Christian faith spelled a life of asceticism—a life of celibacy, a virtuous and chaste existence, which also offered him a means of escape from the threatening ambiguity of parental relations and a chance to realize the cultural ideal of the civilized philosopher who has subjugated the passions of the flesh. In this paper we explore the psychological dynamics of the absent father, the suffering mother and the prodigal son and the role they played in Augustine’s conversion to Christianity.     

Margaret R. Miles’ Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter: An Eriksonian Perspective

My perspective on Margaret R. Miles’s Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter is informed by Erik H. Erikson’s life cycle model (Erikson 1950, 1959, 1963, 1964, 1968a, b, 1982; Erikson and Erikson 1997) and, more specifically, by my relocation of his life stages and their accompanying human strengths (Erikson 1964) according to decades (Capps 2008). I interpret Miles’s account of her life from birth to age forty as revealing the selves that comprise the composite Self (Erikson 1968a) that come into their own during the first four decades of the life cycle, i.e., the hopeful, willing, purposeful, and competent selves     

McTaggart’s Paradox and Crisp’s Presentism

In his review of The Ontology of Time, Thomas Crisp (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2005a) argues that Oaklander's version of McTaggart's paradox does not make any trouble for his version of presentism. The aim of this paper is to refute that claim by demonstrating that Crisp's version of presentism does indeed succumb to a version of McTaggart's argument. I shall proceed as follows. In Part I I shall explain Crisp's view and then argue in Part II that his analysis of temporal becoming, temporal properties and temporal relations is inadequate. Finally, in Part III, I shall demonstrate that his presentist ontology of time is susceptible to the paradox he so assiduously sought to avoid.     

Can the Russellian Monist Escape the Epiphenomenalist’s Paradox?

Topoi - Russellian monism—an influential doctrine proposed by Russell (The analysis of matter, Routledge, London, 1927/1992)—is roughly the view that physics can only ever tell us about...     

How to Resolve Comte’s Challenge: The Answer of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Neo-Aristotelian Alternative

Philosophia - Comte argued against the Cartesian conception of the mind that the thinker cannot simultaneously think or perceive and observe itself so doing. Based on insights from cognitive...     

What is the Question to Which Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation is the Answer?

Interpreters generally agree that the Fifth Cartesian Meditation fails to achieve its task, but they do not agree on what that task is. In my essay, I attempt to formulate the question to which the Fifth Cartesian Meditation gives the answer. While it is usually assumed that the text poses a rather ambitious question, I suggest that the text asks, “How is the Other given to me on the most basic level?” The answer would be that the Other is given as accessible in the mode of inaccessibility. Husserl’s failure to convey this question clearly seems rooted in ambiguities concerning the concepts of solipsism and the sphere of ownness.