ABSTRACT
When Descartes sat ‘by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown’ holding his piece of paper in his hands, and set out ‘once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations’ (First Meditation: CSM II, 13, 12) the argument he used as his foundation immediately reminded his contemporaries of St Augustine. I wish to suggest in this essay that Augustine’s encounter with education as a philosophical problem is greatly illuminated by Descartes’s fire. Augustine, like Descartes, faces education-faces everything that he has been taught-as a philosophical problem which must be thought through ‘right from the foundations’.
