
Lecture Description
By any measure, the greatest Christian thinker of the first millennium of the church's history was St. Augustine (or Augustin), who served for most of his adult career as the bishop of Hippo, a seaport town in North Africa.
Augustin would have seemed an unlikely candidate for this honor, however, given the hostile attitude he maintained toward the Christian faith for the first 30 years of his life. When he finally did come to faith, his hostility was transformed into a powerful and insightful theological mind, which shaped the direction of the Christian movement from his time on.
This lecture briefly summarizes the life of Augustin, especially during his pre-Christian years, and sets the stage for several more lectures that will treat some of the better known aspects of his thought.
Course Index
- Introduction to the Major Themes of Philosophy
- The Ionian Philosophers
- The Italian Philosophers
- The Athenian Pluralists
- The Life and Times of Socrates
- Introduction to Plato
- Plato's World of the Forms
- Plato's Parable of the Cave
- Dualism in Plato
- Introduction to Aristotle
- Aristotle's Metaphysics
- Aristotle's Categories
- Aristotle's Theory of Language
- Aristotle's God
- The Epicureans
- Stoicism
- Philo of Alexandria
- The Christian Synthesis
- Early Christian Apologists
- Antiochan Christianity
- Alexandrian Christianity
- The Council of Nicaea
- Manichaeism
- Neo-Platonism
- The Life of Augustine
- Overview of Augustin's Thought
- Augustin's Epistemology
- Augustin's Epistemology (part 2)
- Augustin's Theory of Faith
- Augustin's Understanding of the Church
- The Pelagian Controversy
- The Pelagian Controversy (cont)
- The Pelagian Controversy (concl)
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Anselm's Cur Deus Homo
- Introduction to the Classical Synthesis
- The Classical Synthesis (part 2)
- Thomas Aquinas and the Five Ways
- Art, Philosophy, and the Renaissance
Course Description
This wide ranging course starts with the pre-Socratic philosophers of the ancient world, and traces the history of philosophical speculation across the ages up to the present. Included along the way is special attention to the greatest Christian thinkers in history, including Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and many others.