Peripatetic is a philosophical doctrine that appeared in Rome along with other Greek philosophies thanks to Carneades and Diogenes, but was little known until the time of Silla. The grammarian Tyrannion and Andronicus of Rhodes were the first to pay attention to the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus.
The obscurity of Aristotle's writings hindered the success of his philosophy among the Romans. Julius Caesar and Augustus patronized the Peripatetic teachings. However, under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, the Peripatetics, along with other philosophical schools, were either expelled or forced to remain silent about their views. This was also the case during most of Nero's reign, although at the beginning his philosophy was favored. Ammonius of Alexandria, a Peripatetic, made great efforts to expand the influence of Aristotle, but at about the same time the Platonists began to study his writings and set the stage for an eclectic peripatetic under Ammonius Sakas. After the time of Justinian, philosophy as a whole fell into decline. But the writings of the scholastics were dominated byAristotle's views.
School Development
The direct followers of Aristotle comprehended and accepted only parts of his system - those that are not of paramount importance in speculative thought. Very few thinkers worthy of being remembered have come out of the Aristotle-peripatetic school. We are talking here only about three - Theophrastus of Lesbos, Straton of Lampsak and Dicaearchus of Messenia. There were also the Peripatetics, who turned out to have done even more than the Aristotelian editors and commentators.
Theophrastus of Lesbos
Theophrastus (Theophrastus, circa 372-287 BC), Aristotle's favorite student, chosen by him as his successor at the head of the Peripatetic school, gave Aristotle's theories a marked naturalistic interpretation. Evidently driven by a desire to bring mind and soul into closer unity than he thought Aristotle brought them into. However, he did not completely abandon the transcendence of reason, but interpreted the movement in which he included, in contrast to Aristotle, genesis and destruction as a limitation of the soul, and "energy" - not just as pure activity or actuality, but also as something akin to physical activity.
His philosophical ideas and peripatetics are practically confirmation that there was no movement that did not contain "energy". This was tantamount to giving movements an absolute character, while Aristotle did not change the absolute. The alleged movements of the soul (Aristotle denied the movement of the soul) were of two types: bodily (for example, desire, passion, anger)and non-material (for example, judgment and the act of knowing). He retained Aristotle's notion that external goods are a necessary concomitant of virtue and necessary for happiness, and believed that a slight deviation from the rules of morality is permissible and necessary when such a deviation will lead to the reflection of a great evil from a friend or provide him with a great good. The main merit of Theophrastus lies in the expansion he gave to natural science, especially botany (phytology), in the devotion to nature, with which he carried out his definition of human characters
Straton of Lampsacus
He was a student of Theophrastus and the next leader of the school of Peripatetics (281-279 BC) after him. Strato abandoned the doctrine of the true transcendence of reason. He placed sensations not in the members of the body, not in the heart, but in the mind; gave feeling a part of the activity of understanding; made understanding interchangeable with thought directed to sensitive phenomena, and thus approached the solution of the thought of understanding the meaning. This was done in an attempt to deduce from Aristotle's concept of nature as a force unconsciously moving towards a goal, a completely simple organic concept of the universe. It would seem that Strato did not deal with experimental facts, but built his theory on a purely speculative basis. His peripatetics is obviously a step forward in the direction taken by Theophrastus.
Dicaarchus of Messenia
He went even further and brought together all concrete forces, including souls,to the one omnipresent, natural vital and sentient force. Here the naturalistic conception of organic unity is presented in perfect simplicity. Dicearchus is said to have devoted himself to empirical research, not to speculative speculation.
Sources
In addition to the primary sources, consisting of treatises and comments of the philosophers of the Peripatetic school, there are works of Diogenes Laertius as secondary sources. Also included are the references made by Cicero, who, it must be said, deserves more credit when he mentions peripatetics than when he talks about pre-Socratic philosophers.
The Archytas of Tarentum, known as the Musician, introduced many ideas of the Pythagoreans into the teachings of the Peripatetics, emphasizing the concept of harmony.
The writings of Demetrius Falerius and other early Peripatetics in philosophy are mostly literary works limited to a general history.
Among the later Peripatetics, mention should be made of Andronicus of Rhodes, who edited the works of Aristotle (circa 70 BC). Exegetus and Aristocles of Messenia belong to the second century AD. Porphyry belongs to the third century, and Philopon and Simplicus to the sixth century. All of them, although belonging to the Neoplatonic or Eclectic schools, enriched the literature of the Peripatetic school with their commentaries on Aristotle. Physician Galen, born about 131 AD. e., is also among the translators of Aristotle.
Retrospective
In fact,peripatetic is the philosophy of Aristotle that was centered around the notion of essence, and essence implies a fundamental dualism of matter and form. Therefore, it is in the philosophy of Aristotle that the objective and the subjective are united in the highest and most perfect synthesis. The concept is the simplest expression of the union of subject and object. The next in complexity is the idea, which is the form of existence and knowledge of existing apart from what is and what is known, while the highest in complexity is the essence, which is partly a question and partly a form that exists in reality, and also in the object of knowledge.
Therefore, from Socrates to Aristotle, there is a true development, the historical formula of which is ideally compact: concept, idea and essence.
