Aristotelian

View more Religion & Spirituality videos

Aristotelian [a‐ris‐tŏ‐tee‐li‐ăn], belonging to or derived from the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384, –322 BCE), the most important of all ancient philosophers in his influence on medieval science and logic, and on literary theory since the Renaissance. In his Poetics, Aristotle saw poetry in terms of the imitation or mimesis of human actions, and accordingly regarded the plot or mythos as the basic principle of coherence in any literary work, which must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Since the Renaissance, his name has been associated most often with his concepts of tragic catharsis, anagnorisis, and unity of action (see unities). The Chicago critics have been regarded as Aristotelian in the renewed emphasis they gave to the importance of plot in literature.

The works of Aristotle (the fourth cent. BCE Greek philosopher) in Arabic translation began to exert a major influence on Jewish thought from the mid-12th century, displacing Neoplatonism. Known to Jews and Moslems alike as "the philosopher," Aristotle was described by Maimonides as having "reached the highest degree of intellectual perfection open to man, barring only the still higher degree of prophetic inspiration." Aristotelianism is found in the 12th century writings of Abraham Ibn Daud and continued to shape Jewish philosophical thinking through the mid-16th century. In the 13th-14th century, an anti-intellectual countermovement arose, composed of traditionalist and kabbalistic critics, including the esteemed Ḥasdai Crescas.

From the ninth century and during the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, Jews living in North Africa and Moslem Europe had access to Aristotelian literature through abbreviated though accurate Arabic translations, which became available after the 12th century in Hebrew translations by Jews living in Christian Europe. Jews also played an important role in their translation into Latin. Generally, Aristotelian philosophy was wholeheartedly accepted by Jewish medieval thinkers because of its pure, less anthropomorphic God-concept. Its theories of the eternity of the universe and of God as the passive, unmoved Mover, however, were often rejected as they contradicted the traditional Jewish understanding of an active, sustaining Creator.

The Arabic philosopher Al-Farabi's tenth-century work, The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, served not only as a basic orientation for Jews and Moslems of his generation, but influenced the works of Maimonides 200 years later. Maimonides, the outstanding Jewish Aristotelian, attempted to synthesize biblical revelations and Aristotelianism. Although Aristotle's reasoned arguments were used scientifically, demonstrating such religious doctrines as the existence of God and God's unity, Maimonides concluded that Judaism's traditional position of creation ex nihilo had to be derived from prophetic faith alone (Guide 2:15). Motivated by his belief that miracles were possible only if built into the original Divine order of the world, Maimonides rejected the Aristotelian concept of the eternity of the universe, i.e., creation as an eternal process and not as a genesis of prime matter. In contrast, however, he negated the traditional notion of individual providence in favor of Aristotle's, claiming that Divine intervention operates on behalf of the human species rather than individual. His successors suggested solutions to reconcile religion and philosophy but Maimonides dominated over the next three centuries.

Hebrew translations of the Arabic commentaries of Averroes (1126-1198) served as the Aristotelian source for Jewish thinkers after the 12th century. Some of them, such as Isaac Albalag, objected to the Maimonidean attempts to rely on the conventional account of the creation to refute Aristotle's proofs of the eternity of the world.

Aristotle is one of the few non-Jews to figure in Jewish legend. Josephus records traditions that he was affected by contact with Jews (Josephus, Apion 1:176-182). Several medieval and Renaissance Jewish writers claim that Aristotle actually converted to Judaism and one story even tells of his natural Jewish origin from the tribe of Benjamin. A number of apocryphal notes ascribed to Aristotle brought him esteem in kabbalistic circles.

---

Aristotle's influence originally survived through his own school, the Lyceum. His works were collected and edited by Andronicus of Rhodes, and commentaries continued until Justinian closed the pagan schools in ad 529. Avicenna and Averroes contributed to the rebirth of Aristotelian studies in the West, which after mild attempts at suppression at the beginning of the thirteenth century burgeoned until Aristotle became ‘the philosopher’, the fountainhead and authority for the great medievals such as Albert the Great and especially Aquinas. However, the Schoolmen were more interested in defending the truth of Aristotle's dynamical and physical system, which they saw as substantially compatible with Christianity, than in promoting the empirical and scientific method that he championed, with the result that to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Aristotle was regarded as little but an obstacle: the author of fossilized and dogmatic scholastic nonsense. Even at this low point Aristotle's moral and psychological insights fared better than his metaphysical and physical speculations, while his logic, although generally regarded as superseded by modern propositional and predicate calculus, is still admired and trawled for substantive insights.

Aristotelianism in the early modern period was the philosophy taught in the schools, typically in the collegiate years preparatory to a bachelor's degree. Thus Aristotelianism and Scholasticism were synonymous at the time, and one cannot talk about Aristotelianism without referring to the important changes in pedagogy that were initiated then. Many colleges and universities reorganized and standardized their curriculum; new teaching orders, such as the Oratory in France (founded 1564; established in France 1613) and the Doctrinaires in France and Italy (founded 1592), were instituted; and the Society of Jesus, which became a very powerful force in education, was established (in 1534), with the aim of using education to counter the effects of the Reformation.

Education during the first half of the seventeenth century became fairly uniform. Students took four or five years of humanities (French, Latin, and Greek language and literature) followed by a year of rhetoric and then the collegiate curriculum, that is, two years of philosophy. The latter was an Aristotelian-based program of logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics; it was thought necessary as preparation for the higher faculties of medicine, law, and theology. Jesuits covered the same collegiate curriculum in three years with the addition of a course in mathematics. Oratorians followed that pattern and taught a broadly Aristotelian set of philosophy courses. Perhaps because of the propensity of their founder, Pierre de Bérulle, for Platonic thought, the Aristotelianism of the Oratory differed slightly from that of the Jesuits and Doctrinaires. The Jesuits officially leaned toward Thomism, the version of Aristotelian philosophy propounded by St. Thomas Aquinas (1224 or 1225–1274) and his followers, though in practice they mixed their Thomism with other kinds of Scholastic thought, while the Doctrinaires seem to have taught Thomism exclusively.

In the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society, recommended that Jesuits follow the doctrines of Saint Thomas in theology and those of Aristotle in logic, natural philosophy, ethics, and metaphysics. After Loyola, the official position of the Society was further specified; Jesuits were supposed to teach "Aristotle and the true philosophy," interpreted as Thomism. With the succession of Claudio Aquaviva as the fifth general of the Society (1581–1615), these issues took on a new vigor. The Society standardized its curriculum during this time. The Jesuits undertook extraordinary pedagogical discussions, ultimately leading to their ratio studiorum (uniform course of studies). The aim of this standardization was to enable Jesuits to propound a single philosophy that would maintain the Catholic faith; as Aquaviva said: "The primary goal in teaching should be to strengthen the faith and to develop piety. Therefore, no one shall teach anything not in conformity with the Church and received traditions, or that can diminish the vigor of the faith or the ardor of a solid piety."

Together with these pedagogical innovations there was an explosion of Scholastic manuals. Among the widely read textbook authors at the time were the Coimbrans and Francisco Toletus. The Coimbrans (the Conimbricenses) were professors at the Jesuit College at Coimbra (Portugal), who issued a series of encyclopedic commentaries on Aristotle's works. Chief among them was Pedro da Fonseca, who wrote his own commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics. Toletus was a professor at the Jesuit Collegio Romano who also published commentaries on Aristotle's works. The Coimbrans wrote volumes by committee, presenting the works of Aristotle that were taught in the curriculum; they followed the model of the great medieval commentaries, each volume treating a specific text (Physics, On the Soul, On the Heavens, etc.), but with an elaborate (post-Renaissance) scholarly apparatus, giving both Aristotle's Greek text and its Latin translation, as well as Latin paraphrases and quaestiones, the resolution of questions relevant to the text under discussion. Other textbook writers generally followed this pattern, although textbooks like those of Toletus omitted the Greek versions of Aristotle. Ultimately, the Scholastic textbook even omitted Aristotle's text itself. Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, in his Summa Philosophiae Quadripartita (Sum of philosophy in four parts, 1609), simply arranged the quaestiones in the order in which the curriculum would have presented them, doing so for all the Aristotelian sciences within the frame of the whole philosophy curriculum in a single volume. As their names generally indicated, these works were usually divided into four parts: ethics and logic, physics and metaphysics. However, the Philosophy (1644) by the Protestant Pierre du Moulin (whose logic text was also translated into English), was a three-part textbook, metaphysics having been omitted, while the Philosophy (1642) of Léonard Marandé added a fifth part: theology.

While the form of Scholastic teaching was fairly stable, its content was not. Aristotle's philosophy dominated the schools in name, but the early modern era also witnessed a growing dissatisfaction with Aristotelian concepts. In fact, the differences among Aristotelians became so widespread that it is difficult to categorize thinkers as Aristotelians based on their doctrines alone. Scholars often regarded themselves as Aristotelians even when they departed from properly Aristotelian thought. One need only consider the case of Théophraste Bouju, whose 1614 textbook was subtitled: "All of it by demonstration and Aristotle's authority, with explanations of his doctrine by Aristotle himself." Despite the subtitle, Bouju denied in his textbook that there is a sphere of fire and an absolute division between the sublunary and superlunary world. These, most would agree, were essential Aristotelian doctrines; dispensing with them would require one to rework substantially the Aristotelian theory of the four elements, of natural and violent motion, and of the heterogeneity of the sublunary and superlunary world. Many other theses that became canonical with later Aristotelians, such as the doctrine of substantial forms, also found early modern Scholastic critics. There were even textbook writers who proclaimed the compatibility of Aristotelian philosophy and atomism. Certainly, late Scholasticism was not "monolithic," although such pejorative labels have been applied to it from the beginning.

Of course, not everyone thought that the differences among Aristotelians were significant. For example, René Descartes (1596–1650) asserted: "As for scholastic philosophy, I do not hold it as difficult to refute on account of the diversity of the scholastics' opinions, for one can easily upset all the foundations about which they are in agreement among themselves; and that accomplished, all their particular disputes would appear inept." For the Schoolmen, departures from properly Aristotelian doctrines were generally presented as elaborations of Aristotle's intentions; outside the Schools they were often cited as objections to them. The situation naturally lent itself to rhetorical excesses on both sides. By the middle of the seventeenth century, accusations of in-fighting and philosophical inconsistency among the Schoolmen were near routine. Coinciding with this rising criticism, rival systems, such as those of Descartes, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), were consciously developed as alternatives to traditional interpretations of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics. As a result, there were also thinkers who set out to mitigate the differences between the rival systems and others who self-consciously resolved to be eclectic, that is, to pick out what is best from the new and old philosophies. Naturally, the new philosophies also remained indebted, in varying degrees, to the tradition from which they attempted to break.

Bibliography

Ariew, Roger. Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ithaca, N.Y., 1999.

Brockliss, L. W. B. French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History. Oxford and New York, 1987.

Dear, Peter. Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools. Ithaca, N.Y., 1988.

Des Chene, Dennis. Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Feingold, Mordechai, ed. Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters. Cambridge, Mass., 2003.

—ROGER ARIEW

For a list of words related to Aristotelianism, see:

• Schools, Doctrines, and Movements - Aristotelianism: practical, empirical philosophy of Aristotle, highly influential throughout course of Western history (Greece, 4th c. B.C.)

---

See words rhyming with "Aristotelian."

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)