This Day in History: Aristotle died on this day in 322 BC, and Thomas Aquinas died on this day in 1274, however both are linked together. The Dark Ages began to see light again when Aquinas discovered Aristotle's writings which were translated into Latin in his time. Plato was the dominant philosopher in the early Church while Aristotle was rejected. As one writer put it: "Abandoning Aristotelianism was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought." - Edward Feser
The writings of Aristotle, their errors notwithstanding, preserved a huge intellectual storehouse of knowledge and argument in Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, Biology, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics, and so on, to give the western world a firm basis to re-establish itself, and put certain key ideas at the forefront of that re-birth, particularly the emphasis on Reason.
According to the philosopher Bryan Magee, "it is doubtful whether any human being has ever known as much as he did". Taneli Kukkonen, writing in The Classical Tradition, observes that his achievement in founding two sciences is unmatched, and his reach in influencing "every branch of intellectual enterprise" including Western ethical and political theory, theology, rhetoric and literary analysis is equally long. As a result, Kukkonen argues, any analysis of reality today "will almost certainly carry Aristotelian overtones ... evidence of an exceptionally forceful mind." Jonathan Barnes wrote that "an account of Aristotle's intellectual afterlife would be little less than a history of European thought".
Aquinas brought Aristotle’s genius to Christendom and to the Western World which would eventually lead to Western enlightenment.
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