Augustine’s Defence of Knowledge Against the Sceptics

In his Contra Academicos, Augustine offers one of the most detailed responses to scepticism to have come down to us from antiquity. In this paper, I examine Augustine’s defence of the existence of infallible knowledge in Contra Academicos 3, focusing on his semantic response to external world scepticism and his appeal to mathematical knowledge to argue against the sceptical thesis that nothing is known. I challenge a number of established views concerning the nature and merit of Augustine’s defence of knowledge and propose a new understanding of several important elements of Augustine’s thought concerning signification, cognition, and object-directed thought. I argue that once we properly understand Augustine’s views on these matters his arguments in defence of knowledge are more interesting and more successful than usually thought.