I don't think that Aquinas is more disregarded than Augustine.

With respect to Augustine, it seems that this phenomenom is due to an overall dismissal of latin as a language for philosophy. There you have Heidegger saying that German and Greek are inherently philosophical, probably with an underlying intention to undermine to discredit romance languages because they are not le aryan.

An even more damned figure is Cicero, which had been in the study curriculums of pretty much any student until 19th century, and now no one talks about him.

>>23627160
>to undermine to discredit

made a typo there, choose the verb you prefer

>>23627160
You might be on to something because Boethius is also ignored despite being a giant in ethics.

Aquinas is still very relevant in the Catholic philosophy space but really a nonentity outside of that despite being a massive contributor.

>>23627118
>Augustine has been demoted from the canon of great philosophers

according to whom?

>>23627118
It's the opposite of your proposed reason. Christian thinking can only survive without competition. It thrives under heresy laws and the use of power to enforce its arguments. As soon as there is an open and free dialogue, Christianity dies out. In short, he is disregarded because his arguments don't hold up.

>>23627287
But he did all sorts of things from modern philosophy first and those still get caught. Augustine
>Did Descartes' cogito before Descartes and probably with better framing
>Did Wittgenstein's "meaning is determined by use," before Wittgenstein but with more nuance.
>Did CS Peirce's triadic semiotics before Peirce and basically invented semiotics
>Did Hegel's Lord-Bondsman dialectic before Hegel. Also did Hegel's process of exploring phenomenological triads in De Trinitate first.

This just doesn't hold up. Plenty of modern philosophers most famous work is their recycling or rediscovery of things Augustine covers.

>>23627118
Has he, though? I don't think he has. The more global work surfaces, the more there is to categorize and place in its own league. He'll always be one of the winners in early Christian devotional literature.

>>23627333
This is not saying that I can predíct, only what I believe to be so.

>>23627260
His cargo cult of egoists spookily asserting their collective hyperreality on the zeitgeist by force of voluminous automated democratic posting, gratutious samefagging, and bribery

>>23627333
Pretty sure OP is talking about his status in philosophy and philosophy syllabi, survey works, etc. Obviously he remains influential as a religious figure. But he was also influential on purely philosophical grounds as well as being held up as a literary figure. The semi-steam of consciousness flow of the Confessions, which is almost like a private prayer we are invited to partake in, is really a standout just in terms of style.

>>23627160
Samefag.

I will also add that lately most prestigious philosophers are of protestant upbringing and, of course, since the very beginning protestants had a crusade against catholicism, which used latin.

Other countries in Europe, like france, started using their vernacular languages in detriment to latin, but for less hostile reasons than those adduced by germans. German also happens to be the last vernacular language among the big ones to be used for philosophy (for example, Leibniz wrote in French and Latin), and that, because it happened somewhat recently along with the protestant issue, contribute to a very sharp dismissal of latin and its authors.

>>23627118
It is part of the general trend to remove any engagement with Christianity.

Another thing is that Philosophy as done by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Plotinus, Cicero is a different subject than modern Philosophy.

To the point that I think I have seen a Philosophy professor using Plato as an argument on why having a relationship with another man while living with her husband in the same house was philosophical.
I have seen "modern Stoics" defending hedonism.

>>23627118
Has he? I'm biased because I'm Catholic and he's my confirmation saint, but it's pretty impossible to understate his importance in the thought of late antiquity. I also used to ascribe to the view that he mostly just "Christianized Plato," but if you actually read City of God he had plenty of original thoughts beyond that.

Aquinas is still more popular than Augustine even amongst completely nonreligious historians of philosophy, though.

>>23627287
Frankly, this just seems implausible given the lengths to which opponents of Christianity go through to make sure it gets no hearing at all. If it was really seen as completely harmless then they wouldn't bother removing overtly Christian texts from curricula. And since Western society was Christian for 1800-1900 years, it would just end up getting a place by default. But I don't recall reading any Christian authors in K-12 or undergrad, outside of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in a Russian lit class (an elective, the mandatory surveys lacked them).

The one exception to this is the mandatory lit survey I took as a freshman had a very short section on the Inferno. We read like two cantos. It was presented as Dante repudiating the Church and giving an endorsement of humanism. I have since come to discover that this is a gross misrepresentation of Dante, who was indeed a humanist, but also a Christian who was spinning Christian philosophy into narrative.

I think the reason is two-fold. Ancient and medieval Christianity isn't just subversive vis-á-vis modern secular atheism, but also quite subversive vis-á-vis modern Christianity. I mean, think about how modern conservatives deplore the homeless in San Francisco and then consider how the city is named for a man famous in part for going homeless.

Augustine is great. Better than Aquinas. That said, I recognize the latter as performing a pivotal role in mediating the philosophical debates of the middle ages. Anyway. Yes, yes, Confessions is sometimes read of Christian devotional literature. A beautiful work of art and prayer. Yes, yes, romaboos still read City of God. An interesting look at the late empire without doubt. But De Trinitate is where he really shines as philosopher. Yet is hardly spoken of. Boethius is even more unheard of. Boethius would fit well in devotional circles. But most know him only through A Confederacy of Dunces. That is how I came across Consolation of Philosophy as well ha.

It is a sad state of affairs. I studied philosophy in uni and my education was problematic to say the least. Good uni, not ivy, but well respected. We were required one intro phil course, one ancient phil course, one modern phil course, and our choices of several of various modules on specialized topics in analytic philosophy. Medieval/Christian and other forms of religious philosophy were considered electives. All philosophy of religion courses moreover were infected w Eliadean perennialism and/or sjw rainbow mob politics. I took them but I've learned more out of classes than in them at this point but even as a young student. Lowest common denominator education, only focused on bottomline, sick society I suppose...


That said, all early Christian Platonists have been criminally neglected in general. Orthobros are the ones translating early church fathers mainly. Am Catholic myself but Clement and Origen despite questionable orthodoxy are particular favorites of mine.

>>23627474
I think the Reformation does play a big role in the neglect of medieval philosophy, even the Arab thinkers. In the early modern period there was this huge project to undercut the edifice that had held up philosophy for 1,000+ years. A lot of the early moderns don't serious engage with their predecessors, at best they attack some strawmen and then declare that philosophy must "start over."

A great deal of value was lost here for sure. I am always shocked by how well medieval thought anticipates some contemporary Continental thought, as well as early modern issues like "do we know things or just our ideas of them." One can find Aquinas anticipating Locke, Berkeley, and Kant, and even offering them a pretty solid solution, one it would take contemporaries a long time to come up with (e.g. enactivism). Semiotics and phenomenology are other examples of areas that had to be "rediscovered" due to amnesia.

I think another problem is that, like contemporary philosophy, scholastic philosophy was written for experts. The texts are dripping with references. They are written for a small, highly trained class who made study the entire focus of their life. Indeed, the scholastic monks' heavy focus on contemplation mean they were "living philosophy" in a way scholars today can hardly approach.

So when the Reformation rolls around there is both a desire to throw out scholasticism (the baby with the bathwater) on sectarian grounds and a move to philosophy being a far more popular discipline, the purview of the well-to-do in general. Now popularity, being able to sell pamphlets is important. And whatever sells will be printed. No longer is there the extremely rigorous exam and disputation system put into place by the schoolmen. A young man can write a pamphlet and if he is lucky it will sell great (even if it butchers its sources), whereas before he would have spent a decade in study before attempting such a thing.

There is obviously good and bad here, but the bad is that we have lost something quite valuable from our history.

Just for an example, Hume's arguments against being able to predicate things or God runs afoul of denials of the univocity of being and the Analogia Entis right out the gate. He seems entirely ignorant of going theological concerns since Plotinus' time. Can we blame him? Perhaps a bit, but it seems that we are more to blame for taking sectarian critics' dismissal of 1,000+ years of the most dedicated study of metaphysics in history at face value.

>>23627739
Contemporary philosophy of religion is atrocious. It's a bunch of analysis of this strange God that I don't think any practitioner of religion actually believes in. There are good recent works that merge philosophy and religion (e.g. Pryzwara, Ulrich, etc.) but most "philosophy of religion" seems incredibly pointless.

I don't know any Orthodox thinkers who write with such a philosophical bent, but I'd love to find them. There is David Bentley Hart, but while I often agree with him I find him needlessly contentious.

The Patristics being seen only as theologians is indeed a great loss. There is sort of a recognition that Augustine's De Trinitate is one of the great works in philosophy of mind, but other great stuff like Gregory of Nyssa or Maximus the Confessor is hardly taken up.

IEP actually does have a decent St. Gregory page though https://iep.utm.edu/gregoryn/#:~:text=Gregory%20was%20a%20highly%20original,possibly%20even%20modern%20European%2C%20thought.

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>>23627316
Not asking as a "source?" fag, but am genuinely interested to see these for myself - can you cite these? In which works can I find them?

>>23627759
>I think another problem is that, like contemporary philosophy, scholastic philosophy was written for experts. The texts are dripping with references. They are written for a small, highly trained class who made study the entire focus of their life. Indeed, the scholastic monks' heavy focus on contemplation mean they were "living philosophy" in a way scholars today can hardly approach.

I'm Spanish, that's why I know about this critique of protestantism, since in Spain there's this Hispanist movement that blames protestantism for the fall of the Spanish Empire and non-idealist philosophy, critique which is most well represented in Gustavo Bueno's philosophy.

One of the Spanish authors I came across with when interacting with this school of thought was Francisco Suárez, a scholastic who wrote in latin and who pretty much laid the ground for the subjetivist turn in philosophy which we now attribute to Descartes. In his texts, which are compilations and commentaries on other scholastics, the difference between object and subject becomes more diffuse.

His influence it's not just a premonitory fiction which happens to match the ulterior development of philosophy, since there is proof that his treatises were used as a school book. For example, protestants who aligned more with Melanchton than with Luther, and therefore, who didn't despise intellectuals, had knowledge of his ideas.

Moreover, Heidegger says about him "der ist der mann", meaning that he is the ultimate enemy to beat in its fight against the oblivion of Being.

Having into account all this lore, and my chauvinistic desire to give national authors the credit they deserve, I tried to get exposed to his ideas first-hand, only to find that he was so obscure and cryptic that I almost didn't understand two sentences in a row. And he was not obscure in a hegelian fashion, in which you can proceed reading and eventually retain something through some kind of poetic inspiration, but in an autistic fashion. If you get lost in a line, you are done, because he is trying to be as logical and rigorous as possible, similarly to Kant, who had a very scholastic style even if he undertook a revolution that attempted to dismiss scholastics, maybe he was able to do that because of his extensive knowledge in scholastics, leading to his style.

What I am trying to say is that the rise of continental philosophy (which has its roots on protestantism), being intertwined with literature, where rigour is not the ultimate goal and, rather, an innovative and fresh worldview (or weltanschauung, as they would say) with aesthetic appeal for mid tier academics, leads to the fall of the much harder and dull scholastic style, and allows them to discuss the exact meaning of texts which have no pretensions of conveying an exact meaning, ultimately feeding the systemic doxographic desire in academia to publish tons of shallow articles to receive funds based on their h index endogamy;

>>23627900
if scholastic rigour provides an unique answer, they can't publish tons of pointless papers without looking ridiculous.

>>23627869
Triadic semiotics is laid out in the often ignored early work De Dialecta. Augustine never returns to working out the theory in a formal model but does return to semiotics throughout his career. De Magisterio is the big early work, which has a more Neoplatonic reading of the sign, whereas he moves to a more purely semiotic view in the triads of De Trinitate. There is some relevant stuff in De Doctrina as well.


The cogito comes up several times and it's used in a variety of ways.

For example, in the Confessions:

>(49.97) All that I have said about the light of the mind has been manifested to me by nothing other than this very same light. For by this light I understand that what I have said is true and, in turn, by this, I understand that I understand. . . . I understand that I cannot understand unless I am alive, and I understand with greater certitude that by understanding I come to be more alive, more vivacious. Eternal life, after all, surpasses life within time by its very vivaciousness. Nor do I catch a glimpse of what eternity is except by understanding. Naturally, by gazing into the mind, I separate out all change-
ability from eternity, and discern within eternity itself no period or space of time, because a period of time consists of movements, whether past or future,
of things. In eternity there is nothing past and nothing future, because what is past has ceased to be and what is future has not yet begun to be. Eternity, however, simply is. Neither did it use to be, as if it no longer is, nor will it be, as if it is not yet. That is why Eternity alone was able to say to the human mind in the truest sense: “I am who am” (Ex 3:14), and of Eternity it can be said in the truest sense: “The One who is has sent me” (Ex 3:14).65

>>23627910
Oops, that first one is from On True Religion. There is one in the Confessions though, but it's the one he does the least with.


And from De Trinitate

(10.14) But since we are investigating the nature of the mind, let us not take
into consideration any knowledge that is obtained from the outside, through
the senses of the body, but consider more attentively the principle which we
have laid down: that every mind knows and is certain concerning itself. For
people have doubted whether the powers to live, to remember, to understand,
to will, to think, to know, and to judge are due to air or to fire or to the brain or
to the blood or to atoms or to a fifth body (I do not know what it is, but it dif-
fers from the four customary elements); or whether the combination or the or-
derly arrangement of the flesh is capable of producing these effects. Some try
to maintain this opinion; others, that opinion. On the other hand, who could
doubt that one lives and remembers and understands and wills and thinks and
judges? For even if one doubts, one lives; if one doubts, one remembers why
one doubts, for one wishes to be certain; if one doubts, one thinks; if one
doubts, one knows that one does not know; if one doubts, one judges that one
ought not to comment rashly. Whoever then doubts about anything else ought
never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, one would be unable to
doubt about anything at all.40

>>23627869
Stacy Stoyanoff has an article on how Augustine anticipates the late Wittgenstein on language, including "meaning is use." There are probably plenty of articles on this actually. Wittgenstein kicks off PI by ascribing a very naive position to Augustine (although this isn't meant to be a full discussion of Augustine) and then goes on to recapitulate some of his more nuanced ideas. But Augustine also avoids the slide into cognitive relativism that Wittgenstein leaves open.

The article only looks at De Magisterio so it is actually really underselling Augustine's philosophy of language since this is an early work.

And then the triadic reasoning so beloved in Hegel is all over De Trinitate, which is a book of triads. It's in other places, but that's the big one.

Something quite like the Lord-Bondsman dialectic is laid out during the first half of the City of God, but not all in one place. The powerful are actually powerless to stop oppressing because of they let the boot up they will be overthrown, so they are slaves too in a way. And they cannot receive any meaningful recognition from those they have denigrated.

Augustine also gets at Hegel's critique of freedom when envisioned in terms of sheer potency, the ability to do anything, since this ultimately collapses into arbitrariness.

>>23627928
>if one doubts, one thinks; if one
doubts, one knows that one does not know; if one doubts, one judges that one
ought not to comment rashly

heh, this one seems to sum up another idea that Wittgenstein is praised to the heavens for, the idea that you can doubt anything but not everything.

Being a bishop is a black mark against him but if you point out he was North African you might be able to get support.

>>23627118
The curriculum might look more toward arguments for the existence of God, in which case Anselm and Aquinas would get more attention.

>>23627118
Most people aren't Christian and Atheists don't really engage with theology.

A read the Confessions and had a religious experience that meets all the criteria William James wrote about while I was hungover. Now I believe in God and cry when I think of the Crucifixion hard enough so uh I guess thank you St. Augustine.

>>23628250
A good deal of Augustine's large corpus is straight philosophy.

>>23627118
>Why do you think Augustine has been demoted from the canon of great philosophers?
Simply christcucks and their apologists are losing power.

>>23627118
It's because he is christian. Is that what you want to hear? Its because christianity bad.

>>23627118
Because Confessions and City of God go against the current jewish communist narrative.

bump, thanks to all the anons effortposting.

>>23630042
I think it's more indirect than that. Because he is Christian and still taken seriously as a Christian writer people are free to radically reread him the way they do with other thinkers.

I have seen skeptical, pro-sophist versions of Plato. Satirist Boethiuses who are moral nihilists. Even skeptical Aristotles. But it's harder to turn Augustine into a Pomo

>>23630841
Yeah this thread has a pretty good amount of effortposting by /lit/ standards, especially for a subject related to religion.

Can you really trust someone who stole a pear once?