Augustine is a Christian father of the late oman Empire -- the traditional date of the "fall" of the oman Empire is about a half-century after Augustine's death -- while Thomas Aquinas is a thinker of the medieval period. It is worth noting this substantially large time difference -- eight hundred years separates Augustine from Aquinas, just as another eight hundred years separate Aquinas from ourselves -- because we need to see Christian thought within its proper historical context. Augustine helped to consolidate early Christian doctrine, while almost a century later Aquinas served to make Christian doctrine congruent with classical (i.e., Aristotelian) science.
To understand Augustine's ethical thought within its proper context, we need to understand the centrality of the concept of original sin in Augustine's thinking. One of the clearest ways in which Augustine personally tried to clarify the doctrine of original sin was in his context with Pelagius and…...
mlaReferences
Aquinas. (1947). Summa theologica. Accessed at: http://www.summatheologica.info/
Augustine. (1955). Confessions. Ed. And trans. A. Outler. Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan. Accessed at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm
Hume, D. (1740). A treatise of human nature. Accessed at: http://www.davidhume.org/texts/thn.html
First year contribution
Heater/Blower Contribution (1,401,955) +
Blanket Contribution (x1000) (16,908)=
System Contribution
Price (discounted) - Direct Costs
729,396.5-535,420
11,835.6-1,197.6
Breakeven in systems (units)
B/E Units (year one) = 799 units
Fixed Cost ($500,000) / System Contribution = 2.44
2) $1,499 for the blower and $20 for the blanket
This is a variable pricing strategy as it considers the costs incurred in the production and distribution of the Bair Hugger Patient Warming System
First year contribution
Heater/Blower Contribution (2,112,091) +
Blanket Contribution (x1000) (28,180)=
System Contribution
Price (discounted) - Direct Costs
1,478,463.7-535,420
Breakeven in systems (units)
B/E Units (year one) = 439 units
Fixed Cost ($500,000) / System Contribution = 0.52
3) $3,995 for the blower and $22 for the blanket
This a skimming pricing strategy as it implements a significantly higher price than the competition.
First year contribution
Heater/Blower Contribution (5,628,955) +
Blanket Contribution (x1000) (28,180)=
System Contribution
Price (discounted) - Direct Costs
3,940,268.5-535,420
Breakeven in systems (units)
B/E Units (year one) = 138 units
Fixed Cost ($500,000) / System Contribution = 0.14
5. ecommended Strategy
The first strategy aims to attract…...
mlaReferences
Augustine Medical Inc., the Bair Hugger Patient Warming System, Case
2009, Breakeven Analysis, Dinky Town, accessed on February 3, 2009http://www.dinkytown.net/java/BreakEven.htmllast
AUGUSTINE'S STUGGLE FO SALVATION
Augustine: Confessions
Augustine's Struggle for Salvation
The eighth book of Augustine's Confessions represents the internal dialog of a man in search of spiritual and religious enlightenment in the form of a very long prayer. The first chapter in Book Eight provides insight into Augustine's anguish over having failed to become a faithful servant of God, while he continued to search for a path towards salvation. Augustine recognized that God's love is what he truly desires and believed wholeheartedly in the virtues of a spiritual path, yet continued to succumb to worldly desires, trivial concerns, and emotional turmoil. This state of desire for spiritual enlightenment in the face of his earthly trappings is captured in his statement "Of thy eternal life I was now certain, although I had seen it 'through a glass darkly'" (Confessions, VIII.i.1). The sentiment "through a glass darkly" comes from 1 Corinthians (13:12), an epistle of…...
mlaReferences
Augustine, Confessions. Trans. Albert C. Outler. 1955. Retrieved from http://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/conf.pdf .
The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Edition. (1962). New York: Meridian.
Augustine's Confessions
Q and a on Confessions
What is Augustine confessing, why, and to whom?
Augustine is confessing to God, because he was a public sinner and in order to justify himself as a Catholic it is necessary to confess and in this sense he is renouncing his old views and letting it be known to both God and man that he now believes as a Catholic. The Confessions is written to God, whom Augustine addresses at length: "Accordingly, my God, I would have no being, I would have no existence, unless you were in me" (Augustine, 2008, p.4)
What book by what author does Augustine read at age 18 that changes his life?
Augustine reads Hortensius by Cicero and this makes him want to pursue philosophy rather than mere sensual pleasure: "That book of his…Hortensius…it altered my prayers" (Augustine, 2008, p. 39).
What method does Augustine learn from the books of the "Platonists" that allows…...
mlaReference List
Augustine. (2008). Confessions. [Trans. By Henry Chadwick]. UK: Oxford.
Thus while he does allow for some Aristotelian influence of the value of sensory experience so he does not fall back into a Manichean divide between good and evil, heaven and earth -- there is some 'good' to be learned with the senses -- Augustine's mistrust of his old sinning life and the world of the senses makes him fundamentally Platonic rather than Aristotelian in nature.
In contrast, Aquinas whole-heartedly embraced the Aristotelian approach to the world. True, some philosophers have since stressed the "prominence in Thomas of such Platonic notions as participation, have argued that his thought is fundamentally Platonic, not Aristotelian. Still others argue that that there is a radically original Thomistic philosophy which cannot be characterized by anything it shares with earlier thinkers, particularly Aristotle. " However, by and large, because of Thomas' emphasis on natural philosophy and the need to proceed from the observable to what…...
mlaWorks Cited
Kilcullen, R.K. "Lectures: Philosophy from Aristotle to Augustine." POL167: Introduction to Political Theory. Macquarie University. 1996. 27, 2008].http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/y67s10.html [November
McIrney, Ralph & John O'Callaghan. "Saint Thomas Aquinas." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2000. 27, 2008].http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/#A4 [November
Mendelson, Michael. "Saint Augustine." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2000. 27, 2008].http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/ [November
R.K. Kilcullen, "Lectures: Philosophy from Aristotle to Augustine," POL167: Introduction to Political Theory, Macquarie University, 1996,
Augustine relates the common human condition of procrastination directly to himself. It thus serves the dual purpose of expounding both the phenomenon of procrastination as experienced by humanity, and of illuminating for the reader the process that Augustine went through at this time. The significance of this is that Augustine is honestly reviewing his life and the mental processes that brought about his conversion.
The way in which he treats his development throughout the work is thus entirely honest and frank. In ook 3 and 4 for example Augustine explains his infatuation with a variety of different philosophical interests, including the Manichaen heresy, astrology and material influences. These, along with his search for an ever-illusive happiness and peace, are what keep him from fulfilling his mother's dream to become a true convert. He confesses to a sense of hunger that brought him to his endless journey of searching for pleasure:
"I…...
mlaBibliography
Augustine. "Confessions." http://www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions.html
God
Look on y Works, Ye ighty, and Despair
Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud's seminal student, wrote that "Bidden or unbidden God is present." This motto of his might well stand in for the ways in which Freud, St. Augustine, and Sallie cFague write about the ways in which they conceive God -- or rather the ways in which they conceive people conceive of God. Each of these writers describes how the idea of God is fundamental to the way in which many people experience their lives, even though not all people recognize a connection between themselves and the kind of personified God that Judaism and Christianity posit. This paper examines the ways in which these three different thinkers address the ways in which individuals understand (but do not necessarily accept) the concept of God and the implications of living in a society that itself clings to the idea of divinity.
The three…...
mlaMcFague, a feminist Christian thinker, is little concerned about whether God exists or not, and if there is indeed the existence of a divine entity what form that existence might take. Rather, she asks people to consider not the nature of God but the function of the idea of God. In this stance she is much more closely aligned with (and allied to) Freud than Augustine, although there exists in the writings of all three of these thinkers an acknowledgement that how we conceive God as being important to us as individuals and as members of groups must be addressed. That is, all three writers ask their readers to think about God as a type of human experience.
McFague does not posit, as Voltaire does, that it God did not exist then it would have been necessary for people to invent him. Or rather, she does not state this with the directness that Voltaire did, but running throughout her 1987 work Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Rather, she engages her readers in asking them to understand why it is that in different ages and in different forms of religious traditions and liturgies individuals conceive of God differently?
Given that the divine comes to have so many and so varied forms in human history, she asks, we must consider that each era chooses certain metaphors with which to discuss religion because those metaphors are the best matches between a time and place and human longing for the divine. Her writings, while based in Christian doctrine, have a deep vein of agnosticism in them, while Freud (in rejecting religion) and Augustine (in glorifying it) are equally convinced of its reality. For McFague, religion (like all other creations) can be used for good or evil. For neither Freud nor Augustine can there be any such ambiguity.
philosophy of St. Augustine on "Free will as the cause of all evil." The paper will analyze this philosophy as compared to the thinking of other philosophers.
Augustine's "Free Will as the Cause of Evil"
Augustine believed that evil is not something positive and God is not the cause of evil, because evil is not a thing. His whole answer on the problem of evil is related to God. He believed that God did not will moral evil in any sense but only permitted it for the greater good that could not be obtained by preventing it. That is why he made man free. He also believes God did not will physical evil for its own sake.
Free Will the Cause of Evil"
The problem of evil can be phrased in several ways. One approach addresses the origin of evil, prompting the syllogism i.e. A series of statements that form a reasoned argument:…...
mlaReferences
Anna Benjamin & L.H.hackstaff, Augustine, Library of liberal Arts
Augustine's Encounter with Neo-Platonism, book 7, last viewed: 19th May'04
http://www.molloy.edu/academic/philosophy/sophia/augustine/conf7_notes.htm
Gregory Koukl, Augustine on Evil, last viewed: 19th May'04 http://www.str.org/free/commentaries/apologetics/evil/augustin.htm
People often say that the end of world is coming. Although this may be true to some extent, this is merely a way of people interacting with society that has happened multiple times in history. A kind of death and rebirth that categorizes a shift in mentality and spirituality. Political idolatry and the weakness of the contemporary subject have become growing problems in today's modern society. A good example of this is Sharia law and the introduction of fundamentalist Islamic beliefs into government. While most of the world is modernizing, some countries have adopted a more dedicated religious perspective that has been corrupted and altered to suit the needs of those who want power.
Secularization theory in essence is the belief that as a society progresses, specifically through rationalization and modernization, so will the authority of religion be lost in evolution. However, there exist various grounds for the revision of secularization…...
mlaReferences
Augustine, and Dyson, R. (1998). The city of God against the pagans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burrell, D. (1997). Augustine and the Limits of Politics. Augustinian Studies, 28(2), pp.165-167.
Cavanaugh, W. (1999). Coercion in Augustine and Disney. New Blackfriars, 80(940), pp.283-290.
Geoghegan, V. (2013). Bloch, Ernst. International Encyclopedia of Ethics.
Augustine contributed greatly to Christianity. He was a man who held beliefs that transcended his turbulent beginnings and manifested into insightful philosophy. Such philosophy became deeply embedded in Christianity and would lend the way for further examination of Biblical text in the future. This essay will discuss Augustine's beliefs- through his contributions to the Church's beliefs and practices.
Augustine contributed not just in the religious sense, but in the philosophical sense. For example, one of his main contributions was Theory of Time seen in Book 11 of Confessions. In it, he developed what some may say a challenging concept of time. From there he examined and tried to explain how young children express language, learn. One of his famous lines "Believe in order that you may understand" can be seen again interspersed in Confessions, with a clear example concerning a crime committed. "hen, then, we ask why a crime was done,…...
mlaWorks Cited
Augustine, Augustine. Confessions. Authentic Publishers, 2012.
Murphy, Andrew R. The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Monica was honored for her forbearance in marriage to an undisciplined, often cruel pagan man. Augustine's father suffers by comparison to Augustine's mother, but rather than suggest that she should have left his father because of his mistreatment, Monica's quiet example of patient endurance is praised by her son.
Augustine's turning towards his mother was seen, through hindsight, as the major development of his life, but he went through several stages of spiritual development, first paganism, and then a cultish version of Christianity called Manichaeism, which was later characterized as a heretical view of the world as evil, as opposed to the goodness of heaven. It also involved a number of highly elaborate eating practices. Augustine was particularly vehement in his later denunciations of the Manicheans and other Christian heretics when he became a bishop in North Africa, very likely because of his own past affiliation with them. Augustine was…...
mlaWorks Cited
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000.
Augustine as Mentor
Augustine's Influence
In writing a book about a figure who played a fairly eminent role in the ecclesiastical history of Christianity such Aurelius Augustine, who lived from 354-430 A.D., Edward Smither has a wide body of thematic issues with which to choose from in his work of non-fiction entitled Augustine as a Mentor, A Model for Preparing Spiritual Leaders. As the title of this manuscript implies, the author is largely concerned with the detailing of various aspects of mentorship related to Augustine. In doing so, he highlights the important figures who were able to mentor Augustine, as well as the plethora of ways in which Augustine was able to mentor others. Not surprisingly, the principle themes in Smither's work revolve about the varying effects and ramifications of mentoring. His primary concern is providing a definition, or model, of what effective mentorship actually is, and then applying this concept to…...
mlaReferences
Smither, Edward. Augustine as a Mentor, A Model fr Preparing Spiritual Leaders. Nashiville: B&H Academic, 2009.
Individuals in the city of god are "predestined to reign eternally with God" (p. 7) whereas people living in the earthly city are fated to "suffer eternal punishment with the devil" (p. 7).
Order in the city of God is different from how it is in the earthly city, given that people in the former respect each-other and God and because they are not motivated by fear or by their desire to rule. In spite of the fact that Augustine aimed at associating the city of God with the Christian church and with Christianity in general while the earthly city was a reference to Ancient Rome and to the part of society that was driven by material values, he does not actually want readers to relate to a physical matter when discussing the two cities. His perspective in regard to the psychological fight between people focused on material values and…...
mlaWorks cited:
Cory, Catherine a. Hollerich, Michael J. Cunningham, David S. "The Christian Theological Tradition." (Prentice Hall, 2008).
Saint Augustine. "The city of God against the pagans." (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Augustine and Science
Science in the modern sense did not exist for Augustine, or indeed for any of his contemporaries, nor were the events of the material universe and the physical-temporal bodies located within it of any great importance to him. Nor was his purpose in writing the Confessions to explain the natural world, but rather to uphold the Truth (in the sense of absolute and eternal Truth as revealed by God) of the Bible and Christianity against its opponents, particularly the Manichean dualists. Augustine has no interest in the natural world in and of itself, or even any real curiosity about nature except as it turns the mind to reflection about the enteral nature of God and the soul (Confessions, 10.6). He rejects the pride, lust and vanity of the material world, including the pride that philosophers took on their wisdom and learning, in favor of following the example of…...
mlaREFERENCES
Augustine (2006). Confessions. Penguin Classics.
Wills, G.A. (2011). Augustine's Confessions: A Biography. Princeton University Press.
Augustine, The City of God
hich one do you think that he is living in?
In The City of God, Saint Augustine of Hippo references two cities. These cities are Rome which he references as the new Babylon and Jerusalem which he calls the city of Heaven because it symbolizes the Christian community. Based upon the way in which he references the two cities, it is likely that St. Augustine lives in Jerusalem. Since he depicts this city in a far more positive light, it is likely that this is where he would choose to live.
According to Augustine, what is the source of human suffering?
Augustine asserts that human suffering is caused by the will of God. He blesses some while cursing others. God does not make people suffer because he is punishing them for wrongs, nor does he grant blessings because he is rewarding them for good deeds. Instead, the suffering is…...
mlaWorks Cited
Augustine. The City of God. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Print.
1. The Essence of Thomas Aquinas's Natural Law Theory: An Exploration of Its Foundations and Implications
Discuss the metaphysical and ethical principles that underpin Aquinas's natural law theory.
Analyze the concept of the eternal law and its relationship to the natural law.
Examine the role of human reason in discerning the precepts of natural law and their binding force.
2. The Harmony of Faith and Reason in Aquinas's Summa Theologica: A Critical Examination
Trace the development of Aquinas's understanding of the relationship between faith and reason.
Explore the arguments Aquinas presents for the compatibility of faith and reason.
Evaluate the strengths....
The dynamic intersection between philosophical ethics and Christian theology is a complex and rich area of study that involves examining the moral principles and values that guide human behavior and decision-making, in both secular and religious contexts. This paper aims to explore this intersection, tracing the historical development of ethical thought in Western philosophy and Christian theology, and examining the ways in which these two disciplines have influenced each other over time.
One of the central themes in this exploration is the concept of moral realism, which asserts that moral values and principles are objective and independent of human beliefs or....
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