Phi201 - Wk5 - Augustine and Boethius

Augustine's view

God = Eternal Truth
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V

The Soul = Human Reason
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The Body

The Soul and the Body are distinct substances

Augustine's Platonism involves the background assumption that the lower concept affect or control the higher. The higher eternal truth from God illuminates our mind, soul. This raises two issues for him.

1. It looks as though the minds must actively grasp something higher than itself when it understands and knows eternal truths. Doesn't this contradict the above background assumption? No, says St. Augustine. God is active in your understanding s of things. Divine illumination is necessary if humans are to understand eternal truths. Your natural powers of reason are ineffective.

2. In Augustine's time, sensation was understood to be a bodily phenomenon. But it affects the mind. Doesn't that contradict the same background assumption mentioned earlier? How does sensation work?

Augustine says that the sensory events of the body don't, contrary to what one might expect, effect the mind. Rather the mind actively looks and tells takes notice of these bodily events without being affected. The mind isn't made to do this.

Boethius


Roman patrician, high in the administration of Ostrogothic King Theodoric. Ostrogoths were Arians. Boethius was Catholic. Cyprian accused a fellow senator of Boethius of treason, of conspiring with the Eastern Emperor Justin to overthrow Theodoric. Boethius defending Albions and use implicated in the plot. So he was thrown in prison where he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy - largely Platonic

Everyone in the middle ages read this. It has been described as encapsulating what it means to be a medieval. (Interestingly, no explicit mention of Christianity)

('edifying')

He was responsible (by his translations into Latin) for the survival in the Latin West for at least some knowledge of Aristotle. He translated the following of Aristotle:

1. Categories - wrote one commentary on this
2. De Interpretation - wrote two commentaries on this

(see gretta's/elo's/pips notes)