In De Trinitate 10, Augustine offers an argument that seemingly proceeds from certain premises about self-knowledge to the conclusion that the mind is incorporeal. Although the argument has sometimes been compared to later Cartesian arguments, it has received relatively little philosophical attention. In this paper, I offer a detailed analysis and original interpretation of Augustine's argument and argue that it is not vulnerable to some of the main objections which have been raised against it. I go on to argue that (...) while an important part of Augustine's argument does face several hitherto neglected objections, Augustine's ultimate case for the incorporeality of the mind is somewhat different and more successful than one might initially think. (shrink)

There is a long history of philosophers granting a privileged epistemic status to cognition of directly present objects. In this paper, I examine three important historic accounts which provide different models of this cognitive state and its connection with its objects: that of the Stoics, who are corporealists and think that ordinary perception may have an epistemically privileged status, but who seem to struggle to accommodate non-perceptual cognizance; that of Augustine, who thinks that incorporeal objects are directly present to us (...) in ‘intellectual perception’, and that, by way of contrast, ordinary sense-perception does not have a privileged epistemic status; and that of William of Ockham, who allows for unmediated action at a distance and is fairly generous about what counts as being directly present. (shrink)

The article treats the role of attention in Augustine’s analysis of sense perception, the notion of time, and the Trinitarian structure of the human mind. The term intentio covers a broad range of meanings in Augustine’s usage. Its most fundamental meaning is the life-giving presence of the soul in the body, intensified in attention’s being concentrated on a particular thing or experience; Augustine also uses the term attentio in this latter sense. According to his analysis of time, by way of (...) attention, the soul fixes the present in which the future passes into the past. Due to the intention of the soul, the form abstracted from an external object is both imprinted into the sense organ and retained in the memory in order to be, by intention again, recalled before the sight of mind. As “the intention of the will” or just “the will”, attention connects intellectual understanding with memory. In Augustine’s eyes, attention has a different quality depending on the object it is oriented to, and a different intensity, ranging from inattentive distraction to concentrated effort. (shrink)