Aristotelianism in the context of "Natural philosophy"

Aristotle (Attic Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, romanized: Aristotélēs; 384–322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science.

Little is known about Aristotle's life. He was born in the city of Stagira in northern Greece during the Classical period. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At around eighteen years old, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty seven (c. 347 BC). Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored his son Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum, which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls.

Macedonia (/ˌmæsɪˈdoʊniə/ MASS-ih-DOH-nee-ə; Greek: Μακεδονία, Makedonía), also called Macedon (/ˈmæsɪdɒn/ MASS-ih-don), was an ancient kingdom on the periphery of Archaic and Classical Greece, which later became the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece. The kingdom was founded and initially ruled by the royal Argead dynasty, which was followed by the Antipatrid and Antigonid dynasties. Home to the ancient Macedonians, the earliest kingdom was centred on the northeastern part of the Greek peninsula, and bordered by Epirus to the southwest, Illyria to the northwest, Paeonia to the north, Thrace to the east and Thessaly to the south.

Before the 4th century BC, Macedonia was a small kingdom with its capital at Aigai, outside of the area dominated by the great city-states of Athens, Sparta and Thebes, and briefly subordinate to the Achaemenid Empire. During the reign of the Argead king Philip II (359–336 BC), Macedonia (with its capital at Pella) subdued mainland Greece and the Thracian Odrysian kingdom through conquest and diplomacy. With a reformed army containing phalanxes wielding the sarissa pike, Philip II defeated the old powers of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. Philip II's son Alexander the Great, leading a federation of Greek states, accomplished his father's objective of commanding the whole of Greece when he destroyed Thebes after the city revolted. During Alexander's subsequent campaign of conquest, he overthrew the Achaemenid Empire and conquered territory that stretched as far as the Indus River. For a brief period, his Macedonian Empire was the most powerful in the world – the definitive Hellenistic state, inaugurating the transition to a new period of Ancient Greek civilization. Greek arts and literature flourished in the new conquered lands and advances in philosophy, engineering, and science spread across the empire and beyond. Of particular importance were the contributions of Aristotle, tutor to Alexander, whose writings became a keystone of Western philosophy.

Scholasticism was a medieval European philosophical movement or methodology that was the predominant education in Europe from about 1100 to 1700. It is known for employing logically precise analyses and reconciling classical philosophy and Catholic Christianity.

The Scholastics, also known as Schoolmen, used dialectical reasoning predicated upon Aristotelianism and the Ten Categories. Scholasticism emerged within the monastic schools that translated medieval Judeo-Islamic philosophies, and "rediscovered" the collected works of Aristotle. Endeavoring to harmonize Aristotle's metaphysics and Latin Catholic theology, these monastic schools became the basis of the earliest European medieval universities, and thus became the bedrock for the development of modern science and philosophy in the Western world. The rise of scholasticism was closely associated with these schools that flourished in Italy, France, Portugal, Spain and England.

In their most common sense, thought and thinking refer to cognitive processes that occur independently of direct sensory stimulation. Core forms include judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation. Other processes, such as entertaining an idea, memory, or imagination, are also frequently considered types of thought. Unlike perception, these activities can occur without immediate input from the sensory organs. In a broader sense, any mental event—including perception and unconscious processes—may be described as a form of thought. The term can also denote not the process itself, but the resulting mental states or systems of ideas.

A variety of theories attempt to explain the nature of thinking. Platonism holds that thought involves discerning eternal forms and their interrelations, distinguishing these pure entities from their imperfect sensory imitations. Aristotelianism interprets thinking as instantiating the universal essence of an object within the mind, derived from sense experience rather than a changeless realm. Conceptualism, closely related to Aristotelianism, identifies thinking with the mental evocation of concepts. Inner speech theories suggest that thought takes the form of silent verbal expression, sometimes in a natural language and sometimes in a specialized "mental language," or Mentalese, as proposed by the language of thought hypothesis. Associationism views thought as the succession of ideas governed by laws of association, while behaviorism reduces thinking to behavioral dispositions that generate intelligent actions in response to stimuli. More recently, computationalism compares thought to information processing, storage, and transmission in computers.

Ibn Rushd (14 April 1126 – 11 December 1198), Latinized as Averroes, was an Andalusian polymath and jurist who was proficient in a variety of intellectual fields, including philosophy, theology, medicine, astronomy, physics, psychology, mathematics, neurology, Islamic jurisprudence and law, and linguistics. 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".

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. He also defended the pursuit of philosophy against criticism by Ash'ari theologians such as Al-Ghazali. Averroes argued that philosophy was permissible in Islam and even compulsory among certain elites. He also argued scriptural text should be interpreted allegorically if it appeared to contradict conclusions reached by reason and philosophy. In Islamic jurisprudence, he wrote the Bidāyat al-Mujtahid on the differences between Islamic schools of law and the principles that caused their differences. In medicine, he proposed a new theory of stroke, described the signs and symptoms of Parkinson's disease for the first time, and might have been the first to identify the retina as the part of the eye responsible for sensing light. His medical book Al-Kulliyat fi al-Tibb, translated into Latin and known as the Colliget, became a textbook in Europe for centuries.

This article covers the conversations between Jewish philosophy and Islamic philosophy, and mutual influence on each other in response to questions and challenges brought into wide circulation through Aristotelianism, Neo-platonism, and the Kalam, focusing especially on the period from 800–1400 CE.