ABSTRACT
It will be useful to end with some reections on the Peripatetic tradition as a whole and its signicant impact on later times. In this brief ‘history’ of the Peripatos I have argued that recent research on the Peripatetics puts us in a good position to give a new and more detailed account of the school and its members. The traditional story of Aristotle as the lone genius and a subsequent decline of the school rests on a particular approach to writing the history of philosophy and blankly accepts that the slender evidence for his successors is sucient to draw broad and authoritative conclusions. To place the emphasis on ‘decline’ after Aristotle, a notion already intimated by Cicero, wrongly implies that one is entitled to expect each successor to be a ‘new Aristotle’. This is not to dispute Aristotle’s originality or wide learning. The extraordinary volume and depth of his thought succeeded in combining empirical results with a broad theoretical framework. But it is clear that these qualities had both a stimulating and a restrictive eect on the activities of his successors: stimulating because Aristotle’s explorations and insights triggered further research; restrictive because his body of work made great demands on his students and set the intellectual framework from which it was not always easy to break away.
