Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the
history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the
British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and
it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly
empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific
method; this character marked and influenced further developments in
British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise
to what we now call British empiricism, which is represented by
philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Beyond
the apparent and explicit criticism of the old Scholastic and
Aristotelian philosophy, which has been very well recognized by the
scholarship in the twentieth century and which has contributed to the
false notion that early modern philosophy emerged as a reaction to
Aristotelianism, the present research examines the continuity, the
original developments and the impact of Aristotelian doctrines and
terminology in logic and epistemology as the background for the rise of
empiricism.Without the Aristotelian tradition, without its doctrines,
and without its conceptual elaborations, British empiricism would never
have been born. The book emphasizes that philosophy is not defined only
by the 'great names', but also by minor authors, who determine the
intellectual milieu from which the canonical names emerge. It considers
every single published work of logic between the middle of the sixteenth
and the end of the seventeenth century, being acquainted with a number
of surviving manuscripts and being well-informed about the best existing
scholarship in the field.
