A report on Thomas Aquinas and Aristotelianism

Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy within the Lyceum and the wider Aristotelian tradition.

Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher", and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply "The Philosopher", while the poet Dante called him "the master of those who know".

Scholasticism was a medieval school of philosophy that employed a critical organic method of philosophical analysis predicated upon the Aristotelian 10 Categories.

The Scholastics, also known as Schoolmen, included as its main figures Anselm of Canterbury ("the father of scholasticism" ), Peter Abelard, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas.

Averroes was a strong proponent of Aristotelianism; he attempted to restore what he considered the original teachings of Aristotle and opposed the Neoplatonist tendencies of earlier Muslim thinkers, such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna.

Although weakened by condemnations and sustained critique from Thomas Aquinas, Latin Averroism continued to attract followers up to the sixteenth century.

During this time Thomas Aquinas began to study under Albertus.

The philosophical works, occupying the first six and the last of the 21 volumes, are generally divided according to the Aristotelian scheme of the sciences, and consist of interpretations and condensations of Aristotle's relative works, with supplementary discussions upon contemporary topics, and occasional divergences from the opinions of the master.

Thomism is the philosophical and theological school that arose as a legacy of the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Dominican philosopher, theologian, and Doctor of the Church.

He often affirmed Aristotle's views with independent arguments, and largely followed Aristotelian terminology and metaphysics.

References to it are also to be found in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and were later expounded upon in the Middle Ages by Christian philosophers such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

Jaffa, Harry V. 1952. Thomism and Aristotelianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Through The Guide for the Perplexed (which was initially written in Arabic as ) and the philosophical introductions to sections of his commentaries on the Mishna, Maimonides exerted an important influence on the Scholastic philosophers, especially on Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.

Maimonides strove to reconcile Aristotelianism and science with the teachings of the Torah.

For instance, Thomas Aquinas understood it to refer to the chronological or pedagogical order among our philosophical studies, so that the "metaphysical sciences" would mean "those that we study after having mastered the sciences that deal with the physical world".

He is thought to have posited water as the single underlying principle (or arche in later Aristotelian terminology) of the material world''.

Averroism refers to a school of medieval philosophy based on the application of the works of 12th-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes, (known in his time in Arabic as ابن رشد, ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) a commentator on Aristotle, in 13th-century Latin Christian scholasticism.

The term Averroist was coined by Thomas Aquinas in the restricted sense of the Averroists' "unity of the intellect" doctrine in his book De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas.

He revives the tradition of Aristotelian ethics with its teleological account of the good and of moral actions, as fulfilled in the medieval writings of Thomas Aquinas.

This Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, he proposes, presents "the best theory so far," both of how things are and how we ought to act.