ABSTRACT
During the last thirty years renewed interest in the writings of philosophers working within the Aristotelian tradition has revolutionised the way that knowledgeable historians of philosophy and science view the way in which philosophy was reshaped during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, those three crucial centuries of the early modem world. We owe this change in perspective to, among others Baldini, Kessler, Lohr, Schmitt and Wallace, who have established that among the variety of Aristotelisms taught in the universities some helped to effect the transformation of natural philosophy and metaphysics which, directly or indirectly, underpinned what has been called the scientific revolution of the seventeenth. This has come as news not only to non-Catholics but to Catholics. When the Catholic historian of philosophy, Coplestone, wrote his history of philosophy not so long ago, Suarez was the only sixteenthor seventeenth-century Aristotelian he studied in detail. I Even Emst
~assirer in his ground-breaking work Das Erkenntnisproblem (a work that Schmitt credits with initiating the idea that the Renaissance philosophical tradition might have helped lead to the scientific revolution2) included only two Aristotelians, Pomponazzi and Zabarella, among his sixteenthcentury philosophers and no Aristotelians among his seventeenth-century
* , I would like to thank Daniel Garber, Luce Giard, Sarah Hutton and above all Eckhard Kessler for conversations on the historiography of Aristotelianism which were central to the development of this paper.
