PRANAS DOVYDAITIS: AUGUSTINO FILOSOFIJOS AKTUALUMAS
Pranas Dovydaitis: The philosophy of Augustine today

Summary/Abstract: In the article, the book by Pranas Dovydaitis (1886-1942) The Modernity of Saint Augustine's Personality and the Relevance of his Philosophy (1931) is considered. Augustine built the Christian understanding of reality on the basis of neo-Platonism, and this way contributed to philosophy no less than to theology. He adapted the Greeks' programme of the seven liberal arts to the development of the Christian personality. According to Dovydaitis, the gnoseology and anthropology of Augustine is more relevant than those of such outstanding thinkers as Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz and Kant. In the Augustinian method of cognition, modern man finds paradigms of truth and freedom similar to those of Goethe's Faust. They make the writings of Augustine pieces of art akin to those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Dovydaitis maintains that Augustine directed mysticism and foundations to scholasticism, and that his relevance to modern philosophy is doubtless.

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