Scholasticism and Aristotelianism: Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

The dominance of Aristotelianism, albeit interwoven with strands from Christianity, Platonism, and other sources, in medieval universities is familiar. The continuing dominance of Aristotelianism, including of the scholastic variety, is also reasonably well known by this point, though one still encounters claims with surprising regularity that seem to have been made in ignorance of the fact. But even to those familiar with the fact that Aristotelian philosophy held sway in many universities throughout the Renaissance and the Reformation and past the introduction of the new philosophies of the 17th century, it can be overwhelming to discover the sheer number and variety of Aristotelians in the centuries more often associated with Ficino, Erasmus, Luther, and Montaigne. Aristotelians contributed to theology, logic, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, political thought, and many other areas. They participated in the main controversies of the day, from the Protestant-Catholic divide, to questions about how to reconcile human free will and divine providence and foreknowledge, to the question of the political legitimacy of monarchs. They contributed to new developments in the natural sciences. They helped give rise to new disciplines such as economics. Aristotelians were also active across the globe. When thinking of Aristotelians, philosophers and theologians in western European centers such as Oxford, Paris, and Salamanca tend to come to mind. But Aristotelians were present all over the globe, from eastern Europe to Asia to Latin America. Jesuit missionaries trained in Jesuit schools played an especially prominent role in disseminating Aristotelian thought globally. Rather than focusing exclusively on the handful of figures who are well known today, this bibliography attempts to represent something of the range of Aristotelian thought, both in topics addressed and geographically. This requires the division of the bibliography into sections to be complex, with some rather non-obvious placements of titles. After a couple of introductory sections covering overviews and reference works, there is a group of sections divided by region, with the Western European section further divided by tradition or school. Works on individual Aristotelians are included here. This is followed by a series of topical sections. It should be noted that this organizational scheme requires many judgment calls about where to place a work (whether, for example, a work on Jesuit political philosophy should be included in the section on Jesuits or in the section on Political and Legal Philosophy). Some cross-references are provided, but not exhaustively.

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