Aristotle's Philosophical Development

Book excerpt: For most of this century, Aristotelian scholarship was dominated by a single question: how might Aristotle's intellectual development be used to shed light on his philosophical doctrines? Opinions differed widely as to how this growth was to be charted; eventually, a reaction to the whole enterprise set in, and the past thirty years have seen the question lose its prominence. Recently, certain scholars have reopened the question. In this collection of new essays, sixteen distinguished scholars reconsider the promise and limitations of developmentalism, with contributions devoted to Aristotle's logic and epistemology, physics, biology and psychology, ethics and politics, and metaphysics. Also included are classic developmental studies by Anton-Hermann Chroust and Thomas Case. Contributors: Enrico Berti, Klaus Brinkmann, Thomas Case, Anton-Hermann Chroust, John Cleary, Alan Code, Russell Dancy, Cynthia Freeland, Daniel Graham, Jaako Hintikka, James Lennox, Deborah Modrak, Pierre Pellegrin, John M. Rist, William Wians, and Charlotte Witt