Marco Sgarbi
The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy
R.Pozzo (ed.), The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy, (Studies in Philosophy and the
History of Philosophy; v. 39), The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 2004,
336 p., $ 69,95.
The British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), co-author with Bertrand
Russell of the Principia mathematica, stated that the entire western philosophical tradition could be
read as a long series of notes to the works of Plato. If this affirmation is indeed true, then it is also
possible to state with equal justification that the entire history of western thought is a comment on
the Aristotelian corpus. Indeed two main traditions have come down to us from ancient Greece:
Platonism and Aristotelianism.
Riccardo Pozzo, the organizer of the Fall 1999 School of Philosophy Lecture Series of the
Catholic University of America and the editor of this volume, has sought to trace the impact of
Aristotle and Aristotelianism on modern philosophy from the Renaissance to the first half of the
twentieth century. The first problem in the reconstruction of the impact Aristotle has had over the
centuries is to understand which Aristotle has been transmitted and by means of which texts. In his
famous book, Aristotle and the Renaissance (1983), Charles B. Schmitt wrote that more than one
kind of Aristotelianism has come down to the modern age and that it is necessary to trace the
interpretations of modern authors not just of Aristotle alone, but also of the various kinds of
Aristotelianism.
The volume edited by Pozzo consists of thirteen essays, written by the most authoritative
historians of the centuries, in which the impact of Aristotelianism has been assessed. The volume
does not aim at being an exhaustive history of modern Aristotelianism. Rather it aims at sketching
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out significant authors, such as Nifo, Vernia, Piccolomini, Zabarella, Galilei, Suárez, Semery,
Leibniz, Rosseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Gadamer.
Kristeller’s disciple Edward P. Mahoney has contributed an essay on Aristotle and Some
Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophers which outlines the progress of Aristotelianism from
the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Mahoney emphasizes the role played first by Averroism,
which was then developed by Nicoletto Vernia, Agostino Nifo, Pietro Pomponazzi and Giovanni
Pico della Mirandola, and Scholasticism by Tommaso de Vio, Antonio Trombetta and Marcantonio
Zimara. Both of which based the interpretation of Aristotle on the Latin translations by William of
Moerbeke, James of Verona, etc. The ripening of Humanism led to the radical change of having for
the first time Aristotle available directly in the Greek. Humanism also brought a shift of interest
from the Organon and the Metaphysics to the Ethics, the Rhetoric and the Politics. Proficiency in
Greek made it possible to widen the field of Aristotelian sources to include Theophrastus,
Alexander of Aphrodisias,Themistius, Simplicius, John Philoponus, and Eustratius. Mahoney has
traced the history of the attempts of reconciling Plato with Aristotle from Antiochus of Ascalon and
Cicero to George Gemistos Plethon, George of Trebizond, Cardinal Bessarion, Francesco
Vimercato and Jacopo Mazzoni. Aristotle, however, was not merely the Philosopher. He was also
the target of a number of critiques. With reference to the four condemnations of Aristotle that were
expounded between 1231 and 1277 and to the critiques formulated by Peter John Olivi, François
Meyronnes, Antonius Andreas, Joannes Canonicus, Gregory of Rimini, Pierre d’Ailly,
Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Francesco Patrizi and Tommaso Campanella, Mahoney has
showed how often and how urgent it was for late Medieval and Renaissance philosophers to
condemn Aristotle for those of his doctrines that could be deemed heretical.
Antonino Poppi has written an essay on Zabarella, or Aristotelianism as a Rigorous Science,
focusing on Jacopo Zabarella, the most influential logician of the sixteenth century. Indeed by the
end of the fifteenth century, the School of Padua had taken over the leadership from Paris in
philosophy and medicine. Aristotle was known directly from the Greek thanks to the acquisition in
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Byzantium of the Greek codices by Petrus of Abano, who was a teacher in Padua at the beginning
of the fourteenth century, while the late fifteenth-century translations by Girolamo Donato and
Ermolao Barbaro helped bring to light the entire corpus aristotelicum. Zabarella shaped his
intellectual personality in the school of teachers such as Marcantonio de’ Passeri, Bernardino
Timitano, Vincenzo Maggi, Francesco Robortello and Giovanni Fasolo. Poppi shows why Zabarella
returned to a form of “pure Aristoteloianism”. He delves into Zabarella’s doctrine of method in his
works Opera Logica, De rebus naturalibus libri triginta and in his commentary on Analytica
Posteriora and De Anima. Poppi insists in portraying Zabarella’s theory of science as both a
demonstrative and an inductive habit.
William A. Wallace has reconstructed The Influence of Aristotle on Galileo’s Logic and its
Use in his Science. He claims that the relation between Galileo and Aristotle was not similar to that
between David and Goliath, but represents instead the history of the transformation from the
Aristotelian method to the modern method of science. He has documented his thesis with three
notebooks in Latin written in the Pisan period: the first on the logical explanation of the Aristotelian
concept of demonstration and proof, the second on the exposition of Aristotle’s teachings on the
heavens and the elements, and the third and last on his early treatises on motion. Wallace
demonstrates that the letter of 14th September 1640, which Galileo wrote to Liceti describing
himself as a true follower of Aristotle, is not at all inconceivable. In fact, there is a strong influence
of Aristotle on Galileo’s thought.
In Wrestling with a Wraith: André Semery, S.J.(1630-1717) on Aristotle’s Goat-Stag and
Knowing the Unknowable John P. Doyle has provided a brief history of ontology from Parmenides
of Elea to André Semery. What is a thing? is the main question that Doyle investigates and that
finds a solution in Semery’s philosophical proposal. A Jesuit strongly influenced by Francisco
Suárez, Semery studied the Analytics, Physics, De Anima, De Coelo, De Generatione et corruptione
in the Collegium Romanum. Doyle sees in Semery one of the protagonists of the revolution of
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seventeenth-century metaphysics, when the subject matter of this discipline shifted from things
themselves to thinking about such things and thinking about thinking itself.
Christia Mercer has dealt in her essay with Leibniz, Aristotle, and Ethical Knowledge and
the reception of Plato and Aristotle in early modern German philosophy. After the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648, she sees four fundamental principles in German philosophy: 1) Luther denied
the possibility of knowing truth without the intervention of God; 2) truth would encourage peace; 3)
ancient philosophers were sources of truth; 4) truth had to be presented in the right way to maintain
peace. In this context, Mercer points out the role played by the Nicomachean Ethics in the
foundation of the new ethics, even though it was not the only textbook. In particular, Leibniz
accepts both Aristotle’s ethics and Plato’s epistemology. Mercer argues that in spite of the massive
criticism levelled by early modern thinkers against Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, ancient
philosophers still exercised a strong influence even within Protestantism.
Richard L. Velkley has contributed an essay on Speech, Imagination, Origins, Rousseau and
the Political Animal, in which he compares Aristotle’s conception of man with that of Rousseau’s.
Both conceive the human being as a rational being or zoon logon echon; they disagree, however, in
defining man as zoon politikon. Indeed, if according to Aristotle man cannot live alone in nature and
must live together with other men, which is the only way in which he can actualize his existence,
according to Rousseau society is the poison of the good man. Velkley argues that in the Discourse
on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men of 1755 there is the strong influence of the
Aristotelian Politics. The problem is to understand how Aristotle’s teleological conception can
influence Rousseau’s political theory, starting from the presupposition that the two philosophers
had different conceptions of social life.
In his essay on Kant on the Five Intelletcutal Virtues, Riccardo Pozzo shows the influence of
the Nicomachean Ethics Zeta on Kant’s logic. The theory of intellectual virtues is the basis of all
introductions to logic, which from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment were divided into four
questions about the nature, subject, goal, and division of logic. Pozzo adduces a great deal of textual
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references to Aristotle in Kant. More especially, he traces the lines of transmission, which were
centered on the dissemination in Protestant Germany of Zabarella’s “pure Aristotelianism”, which
went beyond Humanism by daring to reread the Organon itself. What Zabarella says on Aristotle
came to Kant through the mediation of philosophers such as Martini, Scheibler, Thomasius and
Rabe. Kant’s distinction between habitual philosophy, which is a disposition to philosophize, and
disciplinary philosophy, which is the systematic connection of propositions, gives evidence of the
impact of Aristotelianism on Kant.
Alfredo Ferrarin’s Hegel’s Appropriation of the Aristotelian Intellect provides the most
exhaustive comparison to date between Aristotle and Hegel on Nous, the intellect. Although
Hegel’s interpretation was vitiated by the Neoplatonic orientation of Erasmus’s edition of the
Aristotelian corpus, it is nevertheless one of the most interesting theories developed in the Lectures
on History of Philosophy and the Encyclopedia (starting with the second edition of 1827). The point
Hegel makes is that Nous is the faculty that permits us to acquire forms actively without matter
from experience. In this way, Hegel contributed to shifting towards idealism most of his
contemporaries’ interpretations of Aristotle, which were instead leaning towards empiricism.
Michael Davis writes on Tragedy in the Philosophic Age of the Greek, Aristotle’s Reply to
Nietzsche, maintaining that even though the Aristotelian conception of tragedy is totally different
from that of Nietzsche, they have certain elements in common. For example, the pathe mathos must
be conceived as a metaphysical shelter from the flux of being.
The Presence of Aristotelian Nous in Husserl’s Philosophy is the contribution offered by
Richard Cobb-Stevens, who has shown the depth of the impact of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind on
phenomenology. Cobb-Stevens points out that Husserl’s understanding of the relation between
perceptual discrimination and categorial articulation is remarkably similar to Aristotle’s
understanding of the relation between particulars and universals, which is the basis for the modality
of discerning essences in objects or situations.
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Stanley Rosen’s essay, on Phronesis or Ontology, Aristotle and Heidegger, deals with the
influence of Aristotelian practical philosophy on existential ontology. Phronesis, for Heidegger,
plays a crucial role in the ontology of human existence. It is phronesis that makes it possible to
overcome the difference between the theoretical and practical aspects of life. Rosen concludes that
phronesis is superior to ontology on its own grounds of everyday life and that existential ontology
can bring nothing to human affairs but blindness.
In his essay on Wittgenstein’s Intellectual Virtues, Daniel O. Dahlstrom makes the point that
the connection between Aristotle and Wittgenstein is just as close as that between Wittgenstein and
Plato. Even though Wittgenstein’s references to Aristotle are scanty references about Aristotle and
even though most of them are proofs of his never having any text by Aristotle, the Stagirite’s theory
of the intellectual virtues, according to Dalhstrom, plays nonetheless a major role in Wittgenstein’s
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics.
The volume concludes with Enrico Berti’s essay on The Reception of Aristotle’s Intellectual
Virtues in Gadamer and the Hermeneutic Philosophy. Berti analyzes all the writings dedicated by
Gadamer to the intellectual virtues—in particular to phronesis—from his articles on Aristotle’s
Protrepticus of 1928, and Praktisches Wissen of 1930, to Wahrheit un Methode of 1960, to his very
last contribution to the subject, namely the translation and commentary of the Nicomachean Ethics
Zeta, which appeared in 1998. Berti’s conclusion is that Gadamer failed to recognize Aristotle’s
argument against the primacy of practical knowledge to the detriment of theoretical knowledge.
This volume presents essays written by the most authoritative scholars in their respective
fields. Besides, it does so by using the sound methodology of the history of traditions. Nevertheless,
it is possible to put forward criticisms to some of the articles. Mahoney’s text, which gives a useful
reconstruction of various aspects of Aristotelianism in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, fails
to account for the most important Aristotelian movement of the time, namely Alexandrism. It is true
that Mahoney places Alexander of Aphrodisias within the Humanistic philological perspective.
Poppi has shown that Alexandrism was not only an exegetic and philological tendency and that it
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formed instead the basis of the theoretical reflections of authors such as Pomponazzi and Zabarella.
Another note can be made on the essays by Velkley and Davis, which deal with Aristotelianism
more from the perspective of the history of problems than from that of the history of traditions.
Both develop a theoretical relation with Aristotle, while omitting to describe the latter’s direct or
indirect historical influence on various authors. Worthy of particular attention, for their
thoroughness and innovation, are the articles by Poppi, Pozzo, Ferrarin and Berti. The essay by
Poppi is the best available presentation of Zabarella’s thought in English. Pozzo’s text illuminates a
still much unexplored domain of eighteenth-century Aristotelianism and shows its fertility for
thinkers such as Kant. Ferrarin reconstructs Hegel’s intepretation of Aristotle’s Nous showing that
even at the end of the 18th century Aristotle’s psychology was a much debated paradigm. Finally,
Berti analyzes with great detail a work by Gadamer, which as yet has scarcely been studied. It is an
important brief work, however, for it testifies to the influence of Aristotelianism in the debate on the
Rehabilitierung der praktischen Philosophie.
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