Aristotelianism starts from the concrete world: to understand something, we must ask what it is made of, what form it has, what produces it and what it is for. Every being has a nature and a purpose, and the good life consists in fulfilling human nature well through the virtues. Scholasticism, the method of the medieval schools, applied this rigorous logic to a great question: how can reason and faith agree?
Aristotle taught in Athens in the fourth century BC. His works were preserved and commented on in the Islamic and Jewish worlds by Averroes and Maimonides, and reached the European universities, where Thomas Aquinas joined them to Christian theology. William of Ockham challenged part of that structure. In the Iberian world, Francisco Suárez, Juan de Mariana and Bartolomé de las Casas applied the tradition to law and politics, and António Vieira took it to the pulpit. In the twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe helped revive virtue ethics.
Core ideas
Every being has its own nature and purpose
Happiness comes from living according to the virtues
Reason and faith can go together without contradiction
Where to start reading
Each thinker's starter book, picked for beginners.
