Joachim Haddad

by Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva

Joachim Haddad

June 2024 – With temperatures getting warmer, we travel to the French coast with Joachim Haddad this month. Joachim holds a BA (2013) and an MA (2016) from the Sorbonne University (France), where he specialised in ancient philosophy guided by Laurent Lavaud. After spending some time teaching in high school, in 2019, Joachim joined the doctoral program in Philosophy at Aix Marseille University (France) under the supervision of Isabelle Koch.

Joachim’s dissertation focuses on the question of history in Augustine of Hippo’s writings. He argues that Augustine puts forward a novel conceptualisation of history where the notions of ‘totality’ and ‘event’ acquire a crucial role. For this purpose, Joachim is tracing the gradual development of Augustine’s conception of history. He claims it no longer corresponds to the ‘old’ meaning of historia as the study of past events but, instead, to a universal global history, from the world’s creation to the Last Judgement. Along these lines, Joachim’s stance is that the Augustinian theory of time implies a conceptualisation of history; thus, it is far from being reducible to its mere psychological formulation from Confessions XI. Finally, he also argues that Augustine’s biblical hermeneutics presents a new theory of history, which arises from the distinction between the letter and the spirit to establish the harmony of the two testaments.

Some of Joachim’s publications include the paper ‘Histoire et scandales chez saint Augustine’ (Les Cahiers d’Histoire, 2023), devoted to the notion of ‘scandal’ in Augustine. More recently, he co-edited with Sebastian Hüsch the volume ‘Dieu et la moral’ (Schwabe Verlag, 2024). Here, he also contributes with a chapter titled ‘Les limites épistémiques d’une justice Terrestre, De Civitate Dei XIX, 6’, discussing Augustine’s view concerning the impossibility of earthly justice.