Peripatetic (pronounced per-uh-puh-tet-ik)
(1) Walking
or travelling about; itinerant, wandering, roving, a vagrant.
(2) Of
or of or relating to Aristotle, who taught philosophy while walking in the
Lyceum of ancient Athens (with initial capital letter).
(3) A member
of the Aristotelian school (with initial capital letter).
(4) Of or
relating to the Aristotelian school of philosophy (with initial capital letter)
so named because Aristotle, who used to teach philosophy while walking about
the Lyceum in ancient Athens
(5) A person
who walks or travels about.
(6) In
the British educational system, one employed in two or more educational
establishments and travelling from one to another; applied also to football
coaches, used also as a wry reference to the pattern of them going from club to
club, repeatedly sacked and hired.
1400-1450: From the French péripatétique, from the Latin peripatēticus, from the Ancient Greek περιπατητικός (peripatētikós) (given to walking around (especially while teaching)), from περιπατέω (peripatéō) (I walk around), the construct being περί (peri) (around) + πατέω (patéō) (I walk); in Greek texts from antiquity, peripatein (to pace to and fro) was commonly used. Basis of the whole thing was Aristotle's custom of teaching while strolling through the Lyceum in Athens. In fourteenth century Old French, the word was perypatetique, imported directly from the Medieval Latin peripateticus (pertaining to the disciples or philosophy of Aristotle) In English, the meaning in the philosophical sense began to be used in the 1560s and in the literal sense from the 1610s (person who wanders about). The adjective form (walking about from place to place; itinerant) emerged in the 1640, often humorously tinged. Related forms are the adverb peripatetically and the noun peripateticism. The old alternative spelling peripatetick is obsolete. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) extended the meaning in Our Mutual Friend (1865), using it in a figurative sense to mean “rambling” or “long-winded”, describing someone who tended to long to meander around the topics sometimes never quite reaching the point. Peripatetic is a noun is a noun & adjective, peripateticism is a noun and peripatetically is an adverb; the noun plural is peripatetics.
Saint Thomas Aquinas (circa 1710) by José Risueño (1665–1721).
The Peripatetic axiom is Nihil
est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu (Nothing is in the intellect
that was not first in the senses). It
appears in Questiones disputatae de
veritate (Disputed Questions on Truth) (1256-1259), a collection of
twenty-nine disputed questions on aspects of faith and the human condition by
the Italian Dominican theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).
Aquinas
derived the principle from Aristotle’s Peripatetic school of philosophy. Aquinas insists the existence of God could be
proved by reasoning from “sense data”, an argument he developed using a variation
of the Aristotelian notion of the intellectus
agens (active intellect) which he defined as the ability of the mind to
abstract universal meanings from specific empirical data. The essential idea that human experience can
be based only on sensory input does sound reasonable, after all, what choice do
people have? Such however was the
reverence in the West for Aquinas that his writings on the matter for centuries
influenced not only the theological question but also the interpretation of
Aristotle.
Peripatetic Painting (2015) by Charles Yates (b 1941).
What Aquinas
calls the Peripatetic axiom is his distillation of Aristotelian thought, not a
quote or even a paraphrasing from antiquity but it is anyway certainly a “disputed
question”. Regarding the proposition “nothing
is in the intellect that was not previously in sense” he notes: "That axiom is to be understood as applying
only to our intellect, which receives its knowledge from things. For a thing is
led by gradual steps from its own material conditions to the immateriality of
the intellect through the mediation of the immateriality of sense.
Consequently, whatever is in our intellect must have previously been in the
senses. This, however, does not take place in the divine intellect.”
So ensued centuries of argument between those who maintained empiricism was no
part of the way Aquinas reconciled revealed religion with Aristotelian thought
and those who found Saint Thomas perhaps the proto-empiricist in the sense (1) he held all our ideas are derived from experience so (2) by definition there can be nothing in the
intellect not previously in the senses and (3) that this was implicit in Aristotle.
Despite the implications of that, most however seemed to conclude he did not
think all knowledge either consists of sense experience or is inferred
inductively from experience. From all this, although some remained still unconvinced by his position the
A peripatetic existence; Lindsay Lohan wandering the palnet: Istanbul, Nice, Los Angeles & Mykonos (top row), Dubai, Athens, London & Tokyo (middle row) and Washington DC, Melbourne, New York & Venice (bottom row).
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