(August 31, 2015 at 3:42 pm)Jenny A Wrote:
Thank you that pretty much sums up my feelings about Augustine and Aquinas.
You seem to have good taste and judgement.
(August 31, 2015 at 3:42 pm)Jenny A Wrote: I haven't really read then since college (read thirty or more years ago). I can remember finding them exciting in that they had well thought out systems of thought to explore. Now I mostly notice that as freshman and sophomores we could find the holes. So, historically relevant to philosophical thought, worth pondering, not so much.
In the history of philosophy, neither of them are extremely important. They are certainly not "first tier" sorts of philosophers (or even close to first tier), and can be avoided even if one gets a degree in philosophy.
In the history of Christian theology, both are extremely important.
The philosophers who one must know something about (if one studies philosophy) are Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant. They are all unavoidable for the philosophy major at a decent school. (Fortunately, all of them wrote something worth reading.) Of course, if one goes to a religious school, then one is going to have the writings of religious nuts forced on one. And the school will pretend that the religious nuts are more important to philosophy than they are.
For what it is worth, I have never found Augustine or Aquinas "exciting." They are both tedious and awful. But of the two, Augustine is more palatable (which is really a strong criticism of Aquinas, as Augustine is more than bad enough, though as I say, his discussion of time in his Confessions is worth reading).
And again, for Nestor, I recommend reading Aquinas after Augustine, only if one wants something worse to read on the same sorts of things. The snippets you get from the "proofs" for the existence of God should give you some reason to think that I am giving you an accurate description of what you will be facing if you choose to read Aquinas. But if you must see for yourself, go ahead and pick something he wrote to read. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
