On Interrogation, Introspection, Dialectic and the Ineluctable Polarity of Being and Knowing

This work considers the fundamentally “oppositional” structure of reality, viewing Augustine as a “Christian Heraclitus” and focusing on his conception of dialectic. Matthew W. Knotts situates Augustine's anthropology within a classical Roman philosophical context, while characterizing his intellect by continuous questioning. In this way, the book grounds a constructive philosophical-theological enquiry in an historical-critical study of the sources and their context.

Matthew W. Knotts received his PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2017 as a fellow of the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO). His first monograph appeared in 2020 from Bloomsbury in the Reading Augustine series. He has presented his research at conferences and meetings across the US, Europe, and Australia and has performed research stays at the University of Chicago and the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry of the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. His scholarship has appeared in Philosophy & Theology, Studia Patristica, and the Augustinus-Lexikon, among others. He resides in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Miles Hollingworth is Research Fellow in the History of Ideas at St. John's College, Durham. His writing on Augustine has won awards from the Society of Authors (2009 Elizabeth Longford Grant for Historical Biography) and the Royal Society of Literature (2009 Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction). He is the author of The Pilgrim City: St. Augustine of Hippo and his Innovation in Political Thought (also published by Bloomsbury), which was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone History Book Prize.