Aristotelianism

Between the ninth and twelfth centuries, while the Latin West knew only fragments of Aristotle, the Islamic world was the great guardian and continuator of Greek philosophy. Falsafa — the Arabic transliteration of the Greek philosophía — names the tradition that received, commented upon, and transformed the legacy of Aristotle and of Neoplatonism, facing the decisive problem of articulating Greek philosophical reason with Qur’anic revelation. Without it there would have been no rediscovery of Aristotle in the West and, to a large extent, no Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas. This article traces its protagonists — Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, and Averroes — and the debate that runs through them. ...

If medieval philosophy had to be represented by a single name, that name would be Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher, Aquinas undertook the most ambitious intellectual synthesis of the Middle Ages: harmonizing the philosophy of Aristotle — newly rediscovered in the Latin West through Arabic and Greek translations — with Christian theology. The result was two monumental Summae and dozens of commentaries, disputed questions, and opuscula that shaped Catholic theology, natural law theory, political ethics, and Western metaphysics for centuries. ...

In the heart of the twelfth century, amid Andalusian mosques, North African synagogues, and Egyptian Islamic courts, a rabbi, physician, and philosopher undertook one of the most daring intellectual syntheses of the Middle Ages: to show that philosophical reason and biblical revelation do not contradict each other but are, in fact, complementary. His name was Moses ben Maimon — in Hebrew, Rambam; to the Latin West, Maimonides. No other medieval Jewish thinker exerted so deep and lasting an influence — within Judaism and far beyond it, shaping Christian and Islamic thought in ways that still resonate today. ...

Alasdair MacIntyre Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) was a Scottish-American moral philosopher, the author of one of the most influential works of twentieth-century moral philosophy, After Virtue (1981). His intellectual career was marked by a long pilgrimage: he set out from Marxism in his youth, passed through several positions, and ultimately converted to Catholicism and to Aristotelian Thomism in his maturity. He died in May 2025. MacIntyre diagnosed modern moral language as being in a state of grave disorder — composed of decontextualised fragments of traditions that have been lost — and argued that the “Enlightenment project” of providing an autonomous rational justification for morality had failed, clearing the way for emotivism. His proposal was the recovery of a virtue ethics of Aristotelian-Thomist roots, anchored in communal life and in traditions of enquiry. ...

Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great) Dominican friar, Bishop of Regensburg, and Doctor Universalis. He was the teacher of Thomas Aquinas and the principal figure responsible for the systematic introduction of Aristotle into the medieval Latin world. Unlike other scholastics, Albert had a genuine interest in the natural sciences — botany, zoology, mineralogy, alchemy — combining empirical observation with philosophical reflection. Canonized and declared Doctor of the Church in 1931, he is the patron saint of natural scientists. ...

Aristotle Born in Stagira, in Macedonia, around 384 BCE, the son of Nicomachus — physician to the Macedonian court — Aristotle entered Plato’s Academy at the age of seventeen, where he remained for some twenty years, until his master’s death. He later tutored Alexander the Great and, in 335 BCE, founded the Lyceum in Athens, a school whose members became known as Peripatetics (from their habit of discussing while walking). With Alexander’s death and the wave of anti-Macedonian feeling, he left Athens in 323 BCE — so that the city, according to ancient tradition, “might not sin twice against philosophy” — and died the following year in Chalcis. The body of texts we have inherited from him is the largest and most systematic of antiquity, spanning logic, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. ...

Averroes (Ibn Rushd) Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Rushd, Latinized as Averroes, was born in Córdoba in 1126, at the height of the Islamic civilization of Al-Andalus. A judge (qadi), physician, and philosopher in the service of the Almohad caliphs, he became known in medieval Europe simply as “the Commentator”: his meticulous commentaries on the work of Aristotle were, for centuries, the principal gateway to Aristotelian thought for Latins and Jews. He fell from favor at the end of his life, when his works were condemned, and died in Marrakesh in 1198. ...

Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) Born in 980 near Bukhara, in Persian-speaking Central Asia, Abu Ali Ibn Sīnā — Latinized as Avicenna — was a prodigy: it is said that by the age of eighteen he had already mastered the medicine of his time. He led a turbulent life, amid courts, imprisonments, and posts as vizier, yet left more than two hundred works. His Canon of Medicine was the principal medical textbook in the West for centuries, and his Book of Healing is a vast philosophical encyclopedia. He is the greatest philosopher of the medieval Islamic world, and his name is bound to a distinction that would transform Western metaphysics. ...

Franz Brentano Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was an Austrian-German philosopher whose work marks one of the quiet turning points of modern philosophy. Born at Marienberg am Rhein into a Catholic family of Italian origin — he was a great-nephew of the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano — he took his doctorate at Tübingen in 1862 with the thesis Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (“On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle”), a study that the young Martin Heidegger read in his adolescence and that would shape an entire twentieth-century lineage of return to Aristotle. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, he completed his Habilitation at Würzburg in 1866 and resigned from the priesthood in 1873 amid the crisis opened by the dogma of papal infallibility (Vatican I, 1870). In Vienna, where he taught from 1874 to 1895, he gathered a remarkable constellation of pupils — Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, Stumpf, Ehrenfels, Marty — out of whom phenomenology, object theory, and the Lvov-Warsaw School would emerge. He lost his chair in 1880 because he married (Austrian law treated former priests as still bound by their vow of celibacy) and was reduced to Privatdozent. He retired in 1895 and lived first in Florence and then in Zurich, where he died, blind, in 1917. ...

Maimonides Moses ben Maimon — known by the acronym Rambam and, in the Latin West, as Maimonides — was born in Córdoba, in Al-Andalus, around 1138, and is the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. Fleeing Almohad persecution, his family wandered through North Africa before settling in Egypt, where Maimonides became a court physician and the spiritual leader of the Jewish community of Cairo. He was at once a jurist, a Talmudist, a physician, and a philosopher, and died in 1204. ...