This paper examines Augustine’s views on language, learning, and testimony in De Magistro. It is often held that, in De Magistro, Augustine is especially concerned with explanatory understanding (a complex cognitive state characterized by its synoptic nature and awareness of explanatory relations) and that he thinks testimony is deficient in imparting explanatory understanding. I argue against this view and give a clear analysis of the different kinds of cognitive state Augustine is concerned with and a careful examination of his arguments (...) concerning the deficiencies of testimony in producing these cognitive states. (shrink)

Philosophical work on testimony has flourished in recent years. Testimony roughly involves a source affirming or stating something in an attempt to transfer information to one or more persons. It is often said that the topic of testimony has been neglected throughout most of the history of philosophy, aside from contributions by David Hume (1711–1776) and Thomas Reid (1710–1796).1 True as this may be, Hume and Reid aren’t the only ones who deserve a tip of the hat for recognizing the (...) importance of testimony: St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) affirms the place of testimony in human cognition, at least in his later writings. (shrink)

Philosophers of education often view the role of religion in education with suspicion, claiming it to be impossible, indoctrinatory or controversial unless reduced to secular premises and aims. The ‘post-secular’ and ‘decolonial’ turns of the new millennium have, however, afforded opportunities to revaluate this predilection. In a social and intellectual context where the arguments of previous generations of philosophers may be challenged on account of positivist assumptions, there may be an opening for the reconsideration of alternative but traditional religious epistemologies. (...) In this article, we pursue one such line of thought by revisiting a classic question in the philosophy of education, Meno’s Paradox of inquiry. We do this to revitalise understanding and justification for religious education. Our argument is not altogether new, but in our view, is in need of restatement: liturgy is at the heart of education and it is so because it is a locus of knowledge. We make this argument by exploring St Augustine’s response to Meno’s Paradox, and his radical claim that only Christ can be called ‘teacher’. Though ancient, this view of the relationship of the teacher and student to knowledge may seem surprisingly contemporary because of its emphasis on the independence of the learner. Although our argument is grounded in classic texts of the Western tradition, we suggest that arguments could be made by drawing on similar resources in other religious traditions, such as Islam, that also draw upon the Platonic tradition and similarly emphasise the importance of communal and personal acts of worship. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars charged that mediaeval philosophers confused the genuine intentionality of thinking with what he called the “pseudo-intentionality” of sensing. I argue that Sellars’s charge rests on importing a form of mind/body dualism that was foreign to the Middle Ages, but that he does touch on a genuine difficulty for mediaeval theories, namely whether they have the conceptual resources to distinguish between intentionality as a feature of consciousness and mere discriminative responses to the environment. In the end, it seems, intentionality (...) cannot be “the mark of the mental” as contemporary philosophy usually takes it. (shrink)

Plato has identified Meno’s paradox as one of the most important theoretical challenges to learning. Meno’s paradox is that research and learning about what one does not know is impossible and about what one knows is useless. To solve this paradox, Plato proposed the Theory of Recollection. According to this theory, learning is the recollection of pre-existing knowledge that the human soul has forgotten in mixing with the body. Augustine does not find the Theory of Recollection convincing. Of course, the (...) relationship between Augustine’s position and Plato’s view that knowledge is a recollection is very vague. According to Augustine, learning is not simply the mere receipt of information, but the ability to recall what we already know. Contrary to the early days of his intellectual life, Augustine believes that the example of Socrates’ question and answer with a slave cannot show the correctness of the Theory of Recollection. Augustine’s reflections on the book of The Confessions also show that remembrance involves the a priori existence of the soul. But in the second half of his intellectual life, Augustine believes that divine light brings rational things to the mind and causes them to be known without the need for innate knowledge or the pre-existence of the soul in another world. Some commentators believe that the main reason for this approach is the difficulty of accepting the past life of the soul as the main component of the Theory of Recollection. But there is no consensus among them on the timing and quality of Augustine’s change of approach. According to Gilson, Augustine never categorically disproved the notion that the soul existed before the body, and never explicitly referred to where the soul existed before the body. According to Teske, in the second period of his intellectual life, Augustine retreated from the Theory of Recollection as he had put it in his earlier writings. From O’Daly’s point of view, nowhere in Augustine’s writings can one find an explicit comment on the past life of the soul. The research question is whether the subject of the pre-existence of the soul is the only way to understand Augustine’s position on the Theory of Recollection? In other words, is the only way to get closer to an optimal understanding of Augustine’s change of epistemological approach, to take another ontological position among other opinions? The research claims that the reading of Augustine’s philosophy of language and semiotics opens a new entrance to the theory of divine enlightenment as a novel solution to the Meno paradox. In fact, instead of ontologically, the focus of Augustine’s discussion is on the discussion of language and its ability to convey meaning, real teaching, and learning. According to this linguistic approach, nothing can be learned through words and questions and answers. Therefore, unlike Plato, he concludes that learning is not the same as recollection, but the understanding of knowledge and realities of the outside world is done with the help of the light of the inner teacher, God. Augustine called this thesis divine enlightenment. The purpose of this study is to analyze and explain this claim by emphasizing the treatise on Augustine’s “The Teacher”. In this treatise, he talks about the nature of language and its role in teaching and learning. In this treatise, he emphasizes that words are insufficient to transmit our thoughts and ideas to another, and therefore, the mind reaches the level of enlightenment and understanding of the world with the knowledge it has received from its inner teacher. As a result, enlightenment of the mind by God provides the best explanation for the Theory of Recollection. (shrink)