Like Plotinus in Enn. V,7 (18), Augustine, having been asked to do so by his friend Nebridius, reflected on the issue of ideas of individuals (individual human beings) in his youth (Ep. 14,4). With a geometric analogy as a point of departure, Augustine posited a whole consisting of individual parts, the creator of which undoubtedly knows the ideas of these parts in their multiplicity (in the way a square requires four angles, not merely a single idea of an angle). In his later works (although he did not speak of ideas of individuals), Augustine elaborated on an idea of God who is his knowledge and who knows the individual in its particularity because it is the individual that is of great consequence to God.
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