Peter Bayer

Peter Bayer is a PhD candidate in the Collaborative Specialization in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. In his dissertation, he argues that Augustine’s apparently unique claim that our understanding of the world is guided by the voice of Christ, speaking inside us as a kind of teacher, in fact draws on a long history of attempts to wrestle with the question of how we can know anything at all. This history can be traced back to Socrates' divine sign, and ancient Platonic and Stoic interpretations of this phenomenon. Ancient Stoics and Platonists agreed that the mature human mind contains implicitly in its constitution complete and infallible knowledge of truth, insofar as and because it shares in divine reason, without which knowledge would be impossible. Similarly, Christian writers of the era grounded our ability to know truth in the Scriptural teaching that humans are made in God’s image, interpreted to refer to human reason. However, they also developed an understanding of faith as an indispensable mode of apprehending truth. Because no existing monograph study of ancient epistemology considers its subject from the perspective of the notion of the inner teacher and includes Christian thinkers in its scope, considering these ancient epistemologies in the light of the notion of the inner teacher offers a worthwhile new perspective on the philosophy of the Empire and shows why and how Christian writers should be included in the intellectual history of this period. This project thus opens new lines of research for the study of late antique philosophy across Christian and non-Christian thinkers, whether Platonist, Stoic, or Peripatetic in their leanings.