Peripatetic school

Peripatetic is the name of the philosophical school of Aristotle. Like the other philosophical schools in Athens ( Academy, Stoa, Kepos ), it received its name from the place where the lessons took place, in this case from the Peripatetic ( περίπατος ) for " foyer ". The members of the Peripatetic school hot. The popular etymology, the right of peripatein this name ( περιπατεῖν " wander " ) is derived, is incorrect.

History of the Peripatetic

Aristotle had abandoned in 335 BC his role as educator of the Macedonian prince Alexander and had come back to Athens. There he not returned to the Platonic Academy back and their relatives, he had been for seventeen years, but taught together with his close friend and collaborator at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, a park with a gymnasium area in Athens, outside the city walls. Whether starting your own philosophical school still falls within the lifetime of Aristotle, is controversial in research. Probably was the eponymous " foyer " within the Lyceum, but possibly also on the grounds that Theophrastus after the death of Aristotle bought and mentioned in his surviving Testament. The term " Peripatetic " even as the name of the school is occupied only after Theophrastus.

Scholarchen by Theophrastus were Straton of Lampsacus ( Scholarch since 288/287 or 287/286 BC) and Lycon of Troas (since 270/267 BC), Ariston of Ceos ( since about 224 BC ), Critolaus from Phaselis ( mid-2nd century BC) and Diodorus of Tyra ( until after 110 BC). After Lykon breaks the doxographic tradition from, and it is likely that the school in the first century BC ceased to exist; probably the plants were destroyed in the Mithridatic War in 86 BC. In the research literature before 1972 numerous other alleged school leaders are often called, but can not apply in the strict sense as head of which was founded by Aristotle and Theophrastus school.

The Peripatetic dealt with the items that had treated Aristotle, but had only Theophrastus an equally wide field of vision. The other members of the school focused on the individual sciences, philosophy in the narrow sense was rather neglected. From the first generation of students the title of numerous historical works have survived, but are not get full works. Largely preserved are only two writings on harmony and rhythm of Aristoxenus, which identifies it as a groundbreaking music - mathematician. Straton was the last Peripatetics, who was serving as Major scientist. In addition, and according to him, the school fell into popular science and often unscientific rhetorical scribbling.

Since the second half of the 3rd century BC, extended the meaning of the terms " Peripatetic " and " peripatetic ", which no longer referred to now only the members of the Athenian school of the Peripatetics, but each author whose writings of the Peripatetics justified literary forms of biography and literary history could be assigned.

Aristotelianism since the 1st century BC

A connection with the Aristotelian doctrine since the 1st century BC is referred to in more recent research as Aristotelianism. The innovator of teaching was Andronicus of Rhodes, of which it is unknown whether he in Athens ( as P. Moraux ) or in Rome ( as J. Lynch ) taught and with the re- employment with the Aristotelian treatises ( the so-called " esoteric " scriptures ) began again after can be detected from the two centuries before him only a few traces of use of these works. Aristotelianism by Andronicus, whose history dates back to Alexander of Aphrodisias, is not a continuation of scientific research within the meaning of Aristotle, but a tradition of Aristotle commentary and interpretation, although not one in the footsteps of Aristotle holding philosophical originality excluded. That at least is Alexander of Aphrodisias one of the most important thinkers of ancient Greece.

The n in the second century AD rampant eclecticism merged the Aristotelian with Platonic and Stoic philosophy.

The reception of Aristotelian scholasticism

Since the 13th century, the scholastic philosophy was largely under the influence of Aristotle, as interpreted him Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. With the revival of classical literature in the 15th century began in Western Europe, a common struggle against scholasticism, which initially only against the garbled text of Aristotle, in whose place they sought to put the real Peripatetismus itself, but then also against its philosophy itself returned ( mystic, Ramists ). The Jesuits - in imitation of St. Thomas Aquinas - defended the Peripatetics against innovators like Galileo Galilei and René Descartes. With the success of the natural sciences in the footsteps of Isaac Newton, Aristotelianism went out gradually to the universities.