Two Kinds of Subjectivity in Augustine’s Confessions: Memory and Identity, and the Integrated Self

Abstract

There are several explorations of subjectivity in Augustines thought.1 One is the so-called Augustinian Cogito, where the phenomenon of my awareness of my mental activities (even the awareness of being mistaken) is the basis of epistemological claims about the attainability of certainty. But in one of his Cogito discussions, in Book 10 of his work On the Trinity, Augustine seems to take the argument further, developing the concept of the human mind as a self-thinking subject that