Peripatetic school in the context of "Ancient Athens"

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.

The Lyceum (Ancient Greek: Λύκειον, romanized: Lykeion) was a temple in Athens dedicated to Apollo Lyceus ("Apollo the wolf-god").

It was best known for the Peripatetic school of philosophy founded there by Aristotle in 334 BC. Aristotle fled Athens in 323 BC, and the university continued to function after his lifetime under a series of leaders until the Roman general Sulla destroyed it during his assault on Athens in 86 BC.

Early Islamic philosophy or classical Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar (early 9th century CE) and lasting until the 6th century AH (late 12th century CE). The period is known as the Islamic Golden Age, and the achievements of this period had a crucial influence in the development of modern philosophy and science. For Renaissance Europe, "Muslim maritime, agricultural, and technological innovations, as well as much East Asian technology via the Muslim world, made their way to western Europe in one of the largest technology transfers in world history." This period starts with al-Kindi in the 9th century and ends with Averroes (Ibn Rushd) at the end of 12th century. The death of Averroes effectively marks the end of a particular discipline of Islamic philosophy usually called the Peripatetic Arabic School, and philosophical activity declined significantly in Western Islamic countries, namely in Islamic Spain and North Africa, though it persisted for much longer in the Eastern countries, in particular Persia and India where several schools of philosophy continued to flourish: Avicennism, Illuminationist philosophy, Mystical philosophy, and Transcendent theosophy.

Intellectual innovations, achievements, and advancements of this period included, within jurisprudence, the development of ijtihad, a method or methodological approach to legal reasoning, interpretation, and argument based on independent inquiry and analogical deduction; within science and the philosophy of science, the development of empirical research methods emphasizing controlled experimentation, observational evidence, and reproducibility, as well as early formulations of empiricist epistemologies; commentaries and developments in Aristotelian logic, as well as innovations in non-Aristotelian temporal modal logic and inductive logic; and developments in research practice and methodology, including, within medicine, the first documented peer review process and within jurisprudence and theology, a strict science of citation, the isnad or "backing".

Middle Platonism is the modern name given to a revival and outgrowth of Platonic philosophy, lasting from about 90 BC – when Antiochus of Ascalon rejected the scepticism of the new Academy – until the development of neoplatonism under Plotinus in the 3rd century. Middle Platonism absorbed many doctrines from the rival Peripatetic and Stoic schools. The pre-eminent philosopher in this period, Plutarch (c. 45–120), defended the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul. He sought to show that God, in creating the world, had transformed matter, as the receptacle of evil, into the divine soul of the world, where it continued to operate as the source of all evil. God is a transcendent being, who operates through divine intermediaries, which are the gods and daemons of popular religion. Numenius of Apamea (c. 160) combined Platonism with neopythagoreanism and other eastern philosophies, in a move which would prefigure the development of neoplatonism.

Aristotelianism (/ˌærɪstəˈtiːliənɪzəm/ ARR-i-stə-TEE-lee-ə-niz-əm) 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. It covers the treatment of the social sciences under a system of natural law. It answers why-questions by a scheme of four causes, including purpose or teleology, and emphasizes virtue ethics. Aristotle and his school wrote tractates on physics, biology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government. Any school of thought that takes one of Aristotle's distinctive positions as its starting point can be considered "Aristotelian" in the widest sense. This means that different Aristotelian theories (e.g. in ethics or in ontology) may not have much in common as far as their actual content is concerned besides their shared reference to Aristotle.

In Aristotle's time, philosophy included natural philosophy, which preceded the advent of modern science during the Scientific Revolution. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school and later on by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings. In the Islamic Golden Age, Avicenna and Averroes translated the works of Aristotle into Arabic and under them, along with philosophers such as Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi, Aristotelianism became a major part of early Islamic philosophy.

Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (/ælˈkɪndi/; Arabic: أبو يوسف يعقوب بن إسحاق الصبّاح الكندي; Latin: Alkindus; c. 801–873 AD) was an Arab Muslim polymath active as a philosopher, mathematician, physician, and music theorist. Al-Kindi was the first of the Islamic peripatetic philosophers, and is hailed as the "father of Arab philosophy".

Al-Kindi was born in Kufa and educated in Baghdad. He became a prominent figure in the House of Wisdom, and a number of Abbasid Caliphs appointed him to oversee the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical texts into the Arabic language. This contact with "the philosophy of the ancients" (as Hellenistic philosophy was often referred to by Muslim scholars) had a profound effect on him, as he synthesized, adapted and promoted Hellenistic and Peripatetic philosophy in the Muslim world. He subsequently wrote hundreds of original treatises of his own on a range of subjects ranging from metaphysics, ethics, logic and psychology, to medicine, pharmacology, mathematics, astronomy, astrology and optics, and further afield to more practical topics like perfumes, swords, jewels, glass, dyes, zoology, tides, mirrors, meteorology and earthquakes.

Avicennism is a school of Islamic philosophy which was established by Avicenna. He developed his philosophy throughout the course of his life after being deeply moved and concerned by the Metaphysics of Aristotle and studying it for over a year. According to Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, there are two kinds of Avicennism: Islamic Avicennism, and Latin Avicennism.

According to Nasr, the Latin Avicennism was based on the former philosophical works of Avicenna. This school followed the Peripatetic school of philosophy and tried to describe the structure of reality with a rational system of thinking. In the twelfth century AD, it became influential in Europe, particularly in Oxford and Paris, and affected some notable philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. While the Latin Avicennism was weak in comparison with Latin Averroism, according to Étienne Gilson there was an "Avicennising Augustinism".

Illuminationism (Persian حكمت اشراق hekmat-e eshrāq, Arabic: حكمة الإشراق ḥikmat al-ishrāq, both meaning "Wisdom of the Rising Light"), also known as Ishrāqiyyun or simply Ishrāqi (Persian اشراق, Arabic: الإشراق, lit. "Rising", as in "Shining of the Rising Sun") is a philosophical and mystical school of thought introduced by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (honorific: Shaikh al-ʿIshraq or Shaikh-i-Ishraq, both meaning "Master of Illumination") in the twelfth century, established with his Kitab Hikmat al-Ishraq (lit: "Book of the Wisdom of Illumination"), a fundamental text finished in 1186. Written with influence from Avicennism, Peripateticism, and Neoplatonism, the philosophy is nevertheless distinct as a novel and holistic addition to the history of Islamic philosophy.