Aristotelianism

Aristotelianism from the 19th century

The anti-Aristotelian movement was countered mainly by historical and philological scholarship. As Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, a German philosopher, saw it, Aristotle’s personality and works must be known as exactly as possible because he provides the indispensable historical basis of any serious philosophy. Such a type of study had declined after the great achievements of the 16th century. After the work done between the first new learned edition of the collected Greek texts of Aristotle by J.G. Buhle (1791–93) and a vast collection of all documentary material in the Aristoteles-Archiv at Berlin (which began in 1965), there is little, if anything, that remains to be discovered concerning the original and deteriorated forms of Aristotle’s traditional corpus. A monumental edition sponsored by the Prussian Academy from 1831 to 1870 became the basis for almost innumerable critical editions of individual works. A rich crop of fragments, which were identified and edited in the last centuries, brought to light previously almost unknown aspects of Aristotle’s early activity. And in 1890 a papyrus was discovered in Egypt that contained most of the otherwise lost Constitution of Athens. European and American academies have sponsored the editing of ancient and medieval commentaries and translations in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. Historical, philological, and philosophical exegesis has explored in great detail the contents and background of most of Aristotle’s writings. Translations of all the works into English, German, and French and of many of them into most of the other European languages as well as into Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese have made Aristotle widely accessible. Historians of ideas have investigated Aristotle’s relationship to Plato and to the Greece of his day, his influence in following ages, and his own philosophical development.

Philosophical Aristotelianism has been mainly confined to the German schools established by Trendelenburg and Franz Brentano. Trendelenburg was concerned to effect a revaluation of Aristotle’s metaphysics in the face of German idealism; he had a measure of influence in the United States on such thinkers as Felix Adler, George Sylvester Morris, and John Dewey. Aristotle’s theories of being and knowledge formed the point of departure for Brentano’s “descriptive psychology” and his doctrine of human experience, and they also contributed to the phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Outside Germany, J.-G.-F.-L. Ravaisson-Mollien, a spiritualist philosopher, and Sir David Ross, editor and translator of Aristotle’s works, acknowledged a debt to Aristotle, respectively, for their metaphysics and ethics; and the reestablishment of Aquinas, by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, as the great doctor of the church increased the interest in Aristotle and in his influence on the history of Christian thought. Contemporary philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world is often associated with a keen interest in Aristotle (nor is he entirely neglected in other philosophical traditions), and the name of the Aristotelian Society (London) reflects the view that good philosophy must be practiced in the spirit of Aristotle.