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Updated: June 15, 2025
And on this account I have always been pleased with the custom of the Peripatetics and Academics, of disputing on both sides of the question; not solely from its being the only method of discovering what is probable on every subject, but also because it affords the greatest scope for practising eloquence; a method that Aristotle first made use of, and afterward all the Aristotelians; and in our own memory Plilo, whom we have often heard, appointed one time to treat of the precepts of the rhetoricians, and another for philosophical discussion, to which custom I was brought to conform by my friends at my Tusculum; and accordingly our leisure time was spent in this manner.
Under the Saracen rule they were treated with the highest consideration. They became distinguished for their wealth and their learning. For the most part they were Aristotelians. They founded many schools and colleges. Their mercantile interests led them to travel all over the world. They particularly studied the science of medicine.
Judaism had to be formulated and defended with a view not so much to the dangers threatening from Christianity and Mohammedanism as to those endangering all religions alike, namely, the opinions of science and philosophy as taught especially by the Aristotelians.
Those readers who know on what imperfect data men's impressions are sometimes founded will not be surprised to learn of my impression that an Englishman's politics could be inferred from his mental and social make-up. If all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists, then it may be supposed that all Englishmen are born Conservatives or Liberals.
If all men are by nature either Platonists or Aristotelians, fly-fishermen or worm-fishermen, how difficult it is for us to do one another justice! Differing in mind, in aim and method, how shall we say infallibly that this man or that is wrong? To fail with Plato for companion may be better than to succeed with Aristotle.
And there is no reason why we should not accept the firmament, and the waters above the heaven, and the demons mentioned by the Rabbis, and the account of the days of the Messiah and the resurrection and the world to come. Another theory he criticizes is that developed by Alfarabi and Avicenna, the chief Aristotelians of the Arabs before Averroes.
No one, unless entirely ignorant of the history of thought, will deny that the mistaking of abstractions for realities pervaded speculation all through antiquity and the middle ages. The mistake was generalized and systematized in the famous Ideas of Plato. The Aristotelians carried it on. Essences, quiddities, virtues residing in things, were accepted as a bonâ fide explanation of phaenomena.
And how amusing it is to listen when the Platonists on the one hand and the Aristotelians on the other, among the busy threshers of straw in the Museum at Alexandria, fall together by the ears so vehemently that they would both enjoy flinging their metal cups at each others' heads if the loss of the wine, which I pay for, were not too serious to bear.
On the other hand, the Spanish Jews of Andalusia adopted the views of the philosophers, i. e., the Aristotelians, so far as they are not in conflict with our religion. They do not follow the Mutakallimun, and hence what little of the subject is found in the works of the later writers of this class resembles our own method and views.
Examination will show that the Aristotelians did mean something by this distinction, and something important; but which, being but indistinctly conceived, was inadequately expressed by the phraseology of essences, and by the various other modes of speech to which they had recourse.
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