augustine The Blackwell Great Minds series gives readers a strong sense of the fundamental views of the great western philoso- edited by Steven Nadler blackwell great minds phers and captures the relevance of these philosophers to the way we think and live today. 1. Kant by Allen W. Wood 2. Augustine by Gareth B. Matthews Forthcoming Aristotle by Jennifer Whiting Descartes by Andre Gombay Nietzsche by Richard Schacht Plato by Paul Woodruff Sartre by Katherine J. Morris Spinoza by Don Garrett Wittgenstein by Hans Sluga blackwell great minds augustine gareth b. matthews © 2005 by Gareth B. Matthews blackwell publishing 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Gareth B. Matthews to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo- copying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Matthews, Gareth B., 1929– Augustine / Gareth B. Matthews. p. cm. — (Blackwell great minds) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-631-23347-4 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-631-23348-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. I. Title. II. Series. B655.Z7M18 2005 189′.2–dc22 2004022247 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. 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For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com To Richard Sorabji contents acknowledgments viii translations used ix 1 the first-person point of view 1 2 augustine’s life 7 3 skepticism 15 4 language 23 5 the augustinian cogito 34 6 mind–body dualism 43 7 the problem of other minds 53 8 philosophical dream problems 65 9 time and creation 76 10 faith and reason 86 11 foreknowledge and free will 96 12 the problem of evil 105 13 wanting bad things 115 14 lying 125 15 happiness 134 index 146 acknowledgments I have used parts of “Augustine on reasoning from one’s own case,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 7 (1998): 115–28, in chapter 7. I thank the editor for permission to do so. Chapter 15 is a revised version of “Two concepts of happiness,” which appeared in Jiyuan Yu and Jorge J. E. Gracia (eds.), Rationality and Happiness: From the Ancients to the Early Medievals. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003, 161–74. I thank the editors and the University of Rochester Press for permission to use that material. translations used Translations in chapter 13 of passages from Plato’s Meno, and in chapter 15 of Augustine, are my own. Unless otherwise attributed, passages from Augustine in other chapters are taken, sometimes with minor modifications, from the following translations: Against the Academicians (Contra academicos), tr. Peter King. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. City of God (De civitate dei), tr. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 1984. Confessions (Confessiones), tr. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Lying (De mendacio), tr. Sister Mary Sarah Muldowney, Saint Augustine, Treatises on Various Subjects. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1952, 16:46–110. On Free Choice of the Will (De libero arbitrio), tr. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964; also tr. Thomas Williams, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. On the Immortality of the Soul (De immortalitate animae), tr. Ludwig Schopp, Writings of Saint Augustine. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1947, 2:3–55. On the Trinity, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, tr. S. McKenna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. The Teacher (De magistro), tr. Peter King. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis (De genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber), tr. Edmund Hill, On Genesis. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002, pp. 105–51. References to Plato’s Republic are from the translation by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. References to Descartes are from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols. 1 and 2, tr. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–5. (“CSM, II, 53” will mean vol. 2, p. 53 of this translation. The additional AT citation will refer to the French text Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–76. “At VII, 77” will mean vol. 7, p. 77 of this edition.) Biblical passages are quotations from the Revised Standard Version, copyrighted 1946, 1952, © 1971, 1973, by the Division of Christian Education, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. x translations used chapter 1 the first-person point of view he idea that the words ‘I exist’ (or their equivalent in Greek or Latin) might be used to state a philosophically important truth Twould have mystified the classical philosophers of antiquity. Of course it was important to each of them individually that they existed. Moreover, the existence of each of them individually was important to the development of philosophy. Without the existence of, say, Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle, philosophy would not be what we know it to be today. But no major philosopher of antiquity would have thought of himself as expressing anything philosophically interesting by saying, “I exist.” This observation naturally leads to a second one. No philosopher of antiquity thought of doing philosophy from his own, singular point of view. That observation may come as a surprise. “What about the ancient relativists?” you might ask. Did they not suppose they had to start from how things seemed to them? And was not that doing philosophy from one’s own, singular point of view? The answer is ‘No.’ According to Plato, Protagoras, the most famous ancient relativist, said, “Each thing is to me such as it appears to me” (Theaetetus 152a). So far it might well seem that Protagoras is doing philosophy from his own first-person point of view. But we should note how the passage goes on. Protagoras adds, “and is to you such as it appears to you.” Protagoras’s idea is that the wind is not, in itself, either hot or cold. The wind may be hot to me and cold to you; yet, in itself it is neither hot nor cold. Thus Protagoras denied that there is an objective fact about how things in the world are, independent of how they seem to be to this person or that. But his relativism was universal. He did not give any pride of place to how things seemed to him. Nor did he think he needed to start his philosophy by establishing how things seemed to him before he would be justified in allowing himself to suppose that there might be other points of view. Protagoras does not explain how he knows there even exist other points of view. He just assumes that there are. He shows no special philosophical interest in other minds; he certainly does not suggest that one needs a philosophical argument to prove that they exist. And how things seemed to him in particular was not especially important to him. His point of view was, for him, just one among many, and not a privi- leged point of philosophical departure. His reflections were universal from the beginning, even if universally relativistic. All this seems to have changed with Descartes. It was Descartes who first won broad acceptance for the suggestion that each of us must work out what we know individually, from our own first-person point of view, before we can move on to questions about how the world is, or might be, independently of us. And the foundation stone for the reconstruction of what it is we know, Descartes insisted, is the invulnerability of each philosopher’s claim to know what we express when we say or think to ourselves, “I exist.” Much of modern philosophy and science has, of course, rejected this Cartesian starting point. But the Cartesian proposal has so fully insinu- ated itself into modern ways of thinking that it cannot be ignored, even if we would now like to do so. Popular culture, as well as academic phi- losophy, recognizes at least something of the significance of Cartesian first-personalism. Think of the very old New Yorker cartoon, in which a computer technician reads aloud, in perplexity, the output of a computer tape. “It says,” he reports, “cogito, ergo sum.” Even the unphilosophical reader of the New Yorker will get the joke, and hence realize something of the significance of the philosophical problem of whether a computer could have a genuine thought from its own singular point of view. In fact, it may even cross that unphilosophical reader’s mind that there is a question as to whether the computer literally has a point of view of its own. Descartes does deserve the credit (or the blame!) for convincing much of the modern world that the first-person point of view must be taken seriously.