ABSTRACT
The flourishing of universities in Italy (and Europe) in the twelfth century is in many ways synonymous with the ascendancy of Aristotle as the authority of reference in the Western world. Yet, in the fifteenth century, the way of reading Aristotle as it had traditionally been practiced in the universities of the previous centuries was emphatically proclaimed insufficient. If from a formal point of view humanists advocated for more elegant and precise Latin translations, on a more profound level the image of Aristotle and Aristotelianism became immensely more complicated: several ancient Aristotelian commentaries were rediscovered, while interest in other traditions of thought, and especially Platonism, arose. Because of these developments, the alliance of Aristotelianism with theology came under attack, and Aristotle’s patent of usefulness to Christianity was intensely debated and scrutinized. Moreover, other limits of the Aristotelian tradition were exposed by recent geographical and scientific discoveries. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century, when Aristotle’s philosophy finally lost its centrality in the university curriculum, that these debates declined as well. In the Italian context, the farewell to Aristotle was largely caused by the differences and conflicts among and within Aristotelians themselves, who could not be described as a unified group of thinkers. Italian Renaissance Aristotelianism did indeed represent a vibrant moment in intellectual history.
