A report on Aristotle and Scholasticism

Thomas Aquinas, OP (Tommaso d'Aquino; 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest, who was an immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known within the scholastic tradition as the Doctor Angelicus, the Doctor Communis, and the Doctor Universalis.

Unlike many currents in the Catholic Church of the time, Thomas embraced several ideas put forward by Aristotle — whom he called "the Philosopher" — and attempted to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity.

In the West, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities.

Philosophical discourse was stimulated by the rediscovery of Aristotle and his emphasis on empiricism and rationalism.

Aristotelianism is a philosophical tradition inspired by the work of Aristotle, usually characterized by deductive logic and an analytic inductive method in the study of natural philosophy and metaphysics.

Moses Maimonides adopted Aristotelianism from the Islamic scholars and based his Guide for the Perplexed on it and that became the basis of Jewish scholastic philosophy.

Metaphysics (Greek: τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, "things after the ones about the natural world"; Latin: Metaphysica ) is one of the principal works of Aristotle, in which he develops the doctrine that he refers to sometimes as Wisdom, sometimes as First Philosophy, and sometimes as Theology.

Its influence on the Greeks, the Muslim philosophers, the scholastic philosophers and even writers such as Dante was immense.

The author of more than 100 books and treatises, his philosophical works include numerous commentaries on Aristotle, for which he was known in the western world as The Commentator and Father of Rationalism.

This explanation was used up to the seventeenth century by the European Scholastics to account for Galileo's observations of spots on the moon's surface, until the Scholastics such as Antoine Goudin in 1668 conceded that the observation was more likely caused by mountains on the moon.

Albert was probably educated principally at the University of Padua, where he received instruction in Aristotle's writings.

Albert's activity, however, was more philosophical than theological (see Scholasticism).

As the author of numerous handbooks, and translator of Plato and Aristotle from Greek into Latin, he became the main intermediary between classical antiquity and the following centuries.

Lorenzo Valla described Boethius as the last of the Romans and the first of the scholastic philosophers.

Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato is a central figure in the history of Ancient Greek philosophy and the Western and Middle Eastern philosophies descended from it.

Plato's thought is often compared with that of his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the Western Middle Ages so completely eclipsed that of Plato that the Scholastic philosophers referred to Aristotle as "the Philosopher".

Peter Abelard (Pierre Abélard; Petrus Abaelardus or Abailardus; c. 1079 – 21 April 1142) was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, leading logician, theologian, poet, composer and musician.

He helped establish the philosophical authority of Aristotle, which became firmly established in the half-century after his death.

The Summa Theologiae or Summa Theologica, often referred to simply as the Summa, is the best-known work of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a scholastic theologian and Doctor of the Church.

Throughout the Summa, Aquinas cites Christian, Muslim, Hebrew, and Pagan sources, including, but not limited to: Christian Sacred Scripture, Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Ghazali, Boethius, John of Damascus, Paul the Apostle, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Anselm of Canterbury, Plato, Cicero, and John Scotus Eriugena.