Aristotle

17. ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES

17 ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES 17.1 ANTIQUIT Y Aristotle was esteemed by his immediate contemporaries in particular for his contributions to logics and ethics, but hardly at all for his learned as well as astute research into nature. After his death, his influence increased, emanating from the school of Athens, which stood its ground with varying success until the third century C.E. Under its first head, Theophrastus (372–287 B.C.E.), it attracted an unusually large number of students—no fewer than 2,000 according to Diogenes Laertius (V 2, 37). While Theophrastus preserved Aristotle’s broad intellectual horizon—he became famous for his Metaphysics as well as his botanical writings and his book about Characters—his successor Strato brought empirical research into the natural sciences to the fore. After him, with Lycon, the “death-like sleep of Aristotelian philosophy” (U. v. Wilamowitz) set in. There were still a few outstanding achievements in some specialized disciplines, but no more philosophical impulses. At the best, Aristotle’s philosophical tradition was continued in Rhodes in some way or the other by his pupil Eudemus who, mediated by the Stoics Panaetius and Poseidonius, was to influence Cicero. One of the causes responsible for the decline of the Peripatetic school was the loss of the official school library. Because of this loss, Aristotle was known in Hellenistic times for his dialogues and some exoteric texts, but rarely for his didactic writings. Although copies appear to have existed in Athens and Rhodes, these had no influence. Another decisive factor was a high degree of specialization. On the one hand, this makes it possible to attribute to the Aristotelian school the great researchers and scholars of the Hellenistic age, such as: the geographer and polyhistor Dicaearchus of Messene (born before 340 B.C.E.); Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–230 B.C.E.), who was the founder of a heliocentric model of the planets; the mathematician , geographer, and astronomer Ptolemy (c. C.E. 86–160); the creators of grammar and syntax, Apollonius Dyscolus and his son Herodianus (both second century C.E.; the latter systematized metrics and prosody), and not least the physician, polymath , and commentator of Aristotle, Galen. On the other hand, specialization also made it more difficult to continue Aristotle’s combination of empirical research with (fundamental) philosophical interests. Not least, an advantage according to 189 the theory of science, that is, the absence of a homogeneous system, contributed to the decay of the Aristotelian school. Only Andronicus of Rhodes, the eleventh head of the school, emphasized the teaching of philosophy again, organizing an edition of the hitherto fortgotten treatises in Rome for that purpose (second half of the first century B.C.E.). According to ancient tradition, it was based on original manuscripts, which through fortunate and almost unbelievable circumstances reached Rome, the political and cultural center of the time: Neleus who, being the last member of the school of Aristotle, had inherited the manuscripts from Theophrastus, took them to his home town, Scepsis in Asia Minor, near the ancient city of Troy. Two hundred years later they were bought there by a bibliophile called Apellicon and made accessible to those interested in an, albeit not very reliable, “edition” in Athens. In 86 B.C.E., when Athens was captured by the consul Sulla, who was well disposed toward the Peripatos , he took back Apellicon’s library as part of his loot of books and works of art. The edition organized by Andronicus was the impulse for an Aristotle renaissance , which had more than just intellectual impact. Influential Romans such as the young Octavianus (Augustus) studied with Aristotelians, and later Marcus Aurelius established a chair for Aristotelian studies in Athens. In this period, Aristotle ’s teaching was partly unified, for example in the Epitome of Aristotelian Ethics. Partly it was amalgamated with Platonic thought, for example, in the short work Peri kosmou (De mundo), About the World (cf. Strohm 19843 ), which for a long time, despite the doubts voiced by Proclus, was considered as Aristotle’s own synopsis of his cosmology. The aforementioned Galen based himself partly on Plato, but relied on Aristotle for questions pertaining to the natural sciences. His attempt to establish medicine as a science by using Aristotelian methodology gave philosophy the status of medical propaedeutics. As a result, as late as the thirteenth century , according to a regulation by the emperor Frederick II (Liber augustalis, III, 46), the future doctor would study philosophy—mainly logic...