Augustine of
Hippo 354-430 AD
 Augustine of
Hippo was a fourth century medieval philosopher born in Thagaste
(now Algeria) in 354 AD to a Christian mother and pagan father.
During his early years as a student and teacher of rhetoric at
Carthage and Rome, he was a confirmed Manichaean (a Persian religion,
followers of Manes 216-277) but later in Milan began to study
Neoplatonic philosophy and eventually converted to Christianity.
Just as Thomas Aquinas adopted the thought of Aristotle
as the rational basis of religion, so did Augustine with the
teachings of Plato and Platonism.
In his proof for the existence of God, he began with the fact that
we are capable of acquiring mathematical knowledge and as Plato
demonstrated, this awareness transcends the sensory realm of
appearances.
He further argued that the eternal existence of numbers and their
mathematical relationships required some form of metaphysical support.
This support must generate from a greater being as the eternal source
of the reality of these things. This being must be God.
At the heart of Augustine's philosophy was "Credo ut
intellegiam," meaning "I believe in order that I may
understand". He felt that only through faith could wisdom be
obtained. He saw both philosophy and religion as quests for the same
thing - truth; however, the philosopher without faith could never
attain the ultimate truth. Human reason and philosophy were only
useful to those who had faith.
As a Christian theologian, Augustine remains famous for his
agnostic contributions to Western philosophy. He rejected the
epistemological criticisms by skeptics that there is no basis for
claiming knowledge of our existence. In a proof similar to one later
made famous by Descartes,
he pointed out: "Si fallor, sum" "Even if I am
mistaken, I am".
In other words, it's possible to employ the
human faculties of reason and logic to pursue significant knowledge of
the world.
Augustine is probably best known for his Confessiones
(Confessions), which is a personal account of his earlier life, and
for De civitate Dei (The City of God) which deals with
issues about God, martyrdom and other Christian philosophies.
His early works, including writings on human will and ethics, had
an influence on philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Wittgenstein was fascinated with how Augustine
described the learning of language in Confessions and in
his own work, Philosophical Investigations, successfully
repudiated it.
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