OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Pierre Hadot proposed that philosophical works from antiquity should be approached with the idea of spiritual progress in mind. Even if the work is apparently theoretical or systematic, it was written to allow readers to traverse a certain itinerary which would allow them to make spiritual progress. Studies which have approached the Confessions and De Trinitate with this idea of spiritual progress in mind offer a new understanding of their parallel conceptual and literary structures. A Christian reconfiguration of the Plotinian ascent has been discovered in both works. I want to argue that the same procedure may also be perceived in Augustine’s response to the Platonists in Book 10 of De civitate Dei. Hadot’s approach discloses an unnoticed aspect of his argument about sacrifice in chapters 1-7, where Augustine engages with Platonic accounts of spiritual sacrifice to present his account of the sacrifice offered by Christians.
