Introduction: An Aristotelian Revival?

Abstract

Modern philosophy began with a rebellion against the Aristotelianism of the Scholastics and has, to a large extent, always been defined by it. To be sure, even in the work of the early moderns, the rejection of Aristotelian ideas was not always thoroughgoing. For instance, the Scholastic holdovers in the systems of Descartes and Locke are well-known, and Leibniz was keen to synthesize as much of previous thought as he could. But the obsolescence of the core doctrines of Aristotle’s metaphysics and philosophy of nature — such as hylemorphism, the theory of act and potency, and the doctrine of the four causes — would eventually become something like settled wisdom in post-Cartesian Western thought.