In the ancient world, friendship is taken to be essential to happiness. This paper aims to study what role friendship plays in Augustine’s account of his conversion in his “Confessions.” In this work, the relation between friendship and happiness is actually embedded in the narrative. Friendship seems ambivalent, but Augustine redefines it as a contributing to a shared progress toward God.

This chapter examines the reception of Augustine’s “Confessions” in autobiographical writing, drama, and poetry in Western Europe in the period 1500–1650.

This chapter is a survey of the genesis of the book “Confessions,” including reflections on the title, structure, date, influences, and style; an examination of the conversational structure of the text, including the dialogic form in relation to “Confessions” as a prayer; and an analysis of the terminology of “confession” as both positive (praise) and negative (admission of wrongdoing).

The theme of creation and recreation is at the heart of “Confessions,” and traces two moments in God’s relation to the world that are distinct and yet inseparable. On one hand, creation and recreation beckon toward their unity within the Trinitarian God: the Father forms creation through the eternal Word (Son) and within the Spirit’s love, and recreates through the eternal Word incarnate in Christ. On the other hand, creation and recreation disclose the fundamental ontological and moral character of human existence.

Analyzing the work book by book, this essay discusses the many aspects of sin and concupiscence in Augustine’s “Confessions.” It leads to the conclusion that confessio in the sense of confession of sexual sins is an essential feature of the title and contents of Augustine’s most famous writing.

This chapter highlights the challenges of understanding the generic make-up of the “Confessions” by looking at issues like “the unity” of the “Confessions” and various suggestions and difficulties involved in describing its structure and its genre. The section on structure focuses mostly on various ways of categorizing the units of content within the work, including a concise overview of a variety of proposals that have been made in this regard. The section on genre highlights the generic labels that are most frequently attached to the work (like autobiography, exegesis, protreptic, or apologetic), suggests some others, and also points toward the innovative fusion of antecedent generic conventions that constitutes the “Confessions.”

Augustine experienced an aversio a Deo and then a conversio ad Deum. He highlights the foundational importance of conversion, which comprised both the gift of God’s grace and the responsibility of a human being. The pair aversio a Deo/conversio ad Deum constitutes a continuous dialectical process until the conversio ad Deum of human beings will find its fulfillment. To explicate this idea, Augustine often uses images, such as, the homeland and the way, the two cities, the morning and the evening.

This chapter is addressed to those who wish to read the original sources of Greco-Roman mathematics, either in the original languages or in modern translations. Hence, it focuses on the kinds of mathematics that was disseminated in treatises written by scholars who were members of a relatively small literary elite. This theoretical style of mathematics was not the only kind of mathematics practised in Greco-Roman antiquity, and, indeed, the total number authors of philosophical mathematics must have been dwarfed by the number of individuals who used practical mathematics in their daily work, and who passed on such mathematical skills to their sons, disciples, and apprentices. Nevertheless, the literary works produced by this self-selected group of individuals have elicited the admiration and study of mathematical scholars through the centuries, and have justly been regarded as one of the most important products of ancient scholarship.

There is some uncertainty among historians of science as to when the history of science first appeared. Unlike the old historical debate over the origin of mathematics or astronomy, the origin of the history of science has never been widely discussed or properly considered, and the interested reader will find a variety of starting points which reflect the professional preoccupations of historians. One is in the twentieth century with George Sarton, another in the nineteenth century with William Whewell, and yet another in the eighteenth century with Joseph Priestley. Thus, Helge Kragh regards Priestley’s The History and the Present State of Electricity (1767) as the best example of the history of science in the age of the Enlightenment, which ‘saw history as an instrument for progress in the battle against the old feudal order.

Ask yourself: what is a plant? You will probably answer that it is an organism able to photosynthesise chlorophyll. Depending on your level of knowledge in biology, your answer will be more or less elaborate. Now, ask a young child what a plant is, and their answer is likely to be very different. Their definition may centre on the notion of plant rootedness: a plant is something that is rooted to the ground and cannot move as a result.

Where does musical beauty come from? Can it be comprehended into rules or formulae? Since music was ubiquitous in the life of the ancient Greeks, it is no surprise that they posed these questions, thus triggering one of the most fascinating debates in their intellectual history.