It is Thomas Aquinas's mission to defend the identity of
Stagirite's ideas from attempts to completely forget the connection of the natural and the supranatural, the rational and the suprarational, which seems so optional in a certain way of interpreting the views of the ancient thinker.
But how can we understand this statement without situating it in the discursive and rhetorical context of the Poetics, without placing, at the same time, a minor question about the "community of interpretation" implied by the
Stagirite as it provides us with those lines that overflow from the specific subject of the Poetics and proceed towards a (possible) debate among "intellectuals" of that time?
(76) Power's error: the sobriquet belongs to Aristotle (often simply "the
Stagirite"), not Socrates.
The Activity of Being captures the noble simplicity of the
Stagirite's own method and tone--at once accessible and profound.
Aristotle's skepticism towards mathematics and geometry should not astonish us, just because according to the
Stagirite the formation of scientific concept was based on abstraction, which was linked to the difference between primary substance and secondary substance:
Il est reconnu depuis longtemps que l'animal, dans les traites d'ethique attribues au
Stagirite, est prive de tout droit et de toute vertu morale.
These and other aspects would have compromised in a disturbingly way the reception and the incorporation of the
Stagirite by medieval thinkers.
We find this first of all in Michael Loux's discussion (Chapter 1, 'Being, Categories, and Universal Reference in Aristotle') of the nature of the categories in Aristotle, where the
Stagirite's concern with the meaning of being serves undoubtedly to mirror contemporary interests in relation to problems of language, logic and reference.
Even the Peripatetic and the
Stagirite make appearances.