A G K Y R A

If you haven’t been to the website for Tim Keller’s new book, why don’t you take a look? Make sure your computer audio is turned up so you can hear.

Augustine’s Contra Academicos, or “Against the Academics” is his earliest writing that we still have. It dates from November 386, when he and his students and friends were vacationing at the villa of Cassiciacum in Italy. He had just become a Christian and was preparing to be baptized. The work consists of two layers, really. One layer is a series of dialogues held between him and his students, in which they discuss the relation between wisdom and happiness, and the other layer consists in two letters that Augustine wrote to his friend Romanianus (father of one of the students) when he sent him a copy of the dialogues. The Academics were the members of the philosophical school that had been founded by Plato (the Academy), but the specific Academics that Augustine argues against in this work were the members of the Middle and Late Academy (ca. 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE), who maintained the skeptical position that truth couldn’t be known and therefore one ought not to assent to anything.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I just finished a paper on the work and want to put it out there for anyone who might be interested — probably no one! I’ll send it off to a journal before too long, where people who genuinely might be interested in it could find it. My argument in the paper is that Augustine has three roles that can be discerned in the layers of the text: teacher of rhetoric to his students, concerned friend to Romanianus and those present at Cassiciacum, and seeker after wisdom. The significance of this is that many interpreters of Contra Academicos wrongly assume that Augustine is writing to or for the Academics themselves, and they forget his more personal concerns for those around him. They treat it as a philosophical treatise rather than a rhetorical and personal appeal. I also give a summary analysis of Augustine’s early epistemology from that work and take up the question of the historicity of the dialogues.

By the way, the reason I haven’t posted anything in quite a while is just that I have been busy with school. The fall semester is nearly over, and I only have one more class in the spring while I prepare for my doctoral comprehensive exams in April. I hope to be able to resume posting regularly before too long.

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