Introduction

The philosophical framework built by the later Plato, Aristotle, and his successors at the Lyceum, together with the great philosophers of late antiquity (the Neo-Platonists) and the High Middle Ages (Christian, Jewish, and Islamic), has endured for so long and through so many intellectual revolutions as to earn the sobriquet of ‘the perennial philosophy.’ This philosophy shaped and structured most of the formal theology of the Abrahamic faiths. The resurgence of Aristotelian concepts, theses, and explanations which has taken place in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century philosophy, and which may have far-reaching implications for philosophical theology and the burgeoning discipline of analytic theology, has many roots. Key elements of Aristotelianism (such as teleology) were reintroduced into philosophy by Leibniz. The restoration has not been confined to the rarefied world of metaphysics.