WHEN I WAS SITTING IN SWEETWATERS EARLIER TODAY: Marking up for my presentation on Augustine and the image, I was reading a number of his writings with an eye to his epistemology, and it occurs to me that he has a certain formulation:
there are two types of things we can 'know:' things immediately present to us via sense experience, and the direct contents of our own mental processes.
there are a number of other facts which are present to us neither as immediate physical facts nor our own states of being (his example is that ancient Rome existed, though none of us have ever seen it), which we simply have to 'believe,' that is, accept as true even though it cannot meet the threshold for 'knowing.'
Why is this interesting? Because sometime in the late 4th Century, a pretty smart guy presaged the entire course of metaphysics and epistemology between Descartes and Kant... it's all there. Frightening.
Sort of makes you think analytic philosophy is missing something relatively important by abandoning the study of all of those 'medieval' Christian thinkers.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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