Samuel Pell

The Confessions is an account of Augustine’s search for truth and happiness, terminating in his conversion to Latin Christianity. In recounting the story of his restless quest, Augustine also wrestles with a philosophical paradox related to the possibility of searching for anything. This paradox, first presented in Plato’s dialogue Meno, asks how one can successfully search for something of which one has no knowledge. Gareth Matthews breaks Meno’s paradox into two parts: 1) a targeting problem, which asks how we can know to search for something we have never experienced, and 2) a recognition problem, which asks how we can know we have found something if we do not have any prior knowledge of it. In his paper, ‘The Paradox of Inquiry in Augustine’s Confessions’, Scott MacDonald argues that any successful resolution to the paradox must satisfy what he calls the ‘qualified knowledge constraint on searching’: namely, that, ‘if it is possible to come to know an object by searching for it, it must be that one already knows in some way or to some extent the object one is searching for’. MacDonald goes on to show how Augustine ultimately resolves this problem by considering how God can dwell in his memory. By MacDonald’s interpretation, Augustine discovers that he has memories of joy and truth in his mind which serve as finite ‘tokens’ of God, who is joy and truth itself. In this paper, I will argue that this model based on ‘tokens’ essentially works, though MacDonald’s presentation does not account for the cases of concupiscence and self-deception. To account for these cases, I will show how even ephemeral joys can solve the recognition problem, and how memories of truth can resolve the targeting problem by eliciting a search for higher forms of truth. Augustine's resolution to Meno’s paradox is at once philosophically satisfying and psychologically penetrating.

In his recent book 'Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity,' Alasdair MacIntyre argues that expressivist metaethics invalidates NeoAristotelian first-order moral theory. In this paper, I will challenge this claim by developing an expressivist reading of NeoAristotelian first-order theory that is inspired by Harry Frankfurt. I will then show how this reading is able to make sense of the moral transformations that MacIntyre thinks are only intelligible within a NeoAristotelian metaethical framework. Specifically, I will focus on the transformation of desire under the tutelage of one’s elders, and the acquisition of sociological self-awareness through shared deliberation with one’s friends. While MacIntyre offers an interesting NeoAristotelian account of these moral transformations, he has failed to show how these transformations are invalidated by expressivism.