WI: A world without Aristotle's philosophy

Skallagrim

Banned
I have just posted another thread that serves as a companion to this one. In that thread, we may speculate on a world in which Plato's philosophy is completely lost to posterity. In this thread, I'd instead like to invite people to consider a world wherein the works and the philosophy of Aristotle have been irrevocably lost.

Here, too, I'd like to keep other circumstances the same as in OTL as far as can be achieved. As such, Aristotle cannot just die in infancy or something. He still instructs Alexander the Great, just as in OTL. Just as in the other thread, let us assume that the philosophy of Aristotle gets wiped out shortly after his OTL demise. His successors at the Peripatetic School die in a fire that also destroys all known copies of his work. If we buy the story about a copy of his works having been stored in a damp cellar for years in OTL before being rediscovered, let's also assume that this copy rots away entirely and is never recovered.

As I stated in the other thread: later contributors notwithstanding, I believe that Western philosophy was to a considerable extent built on the works of Plato and Aristotle, and that the dualism between those two strains remains visible even up to the present day. So what if one of those two had been lost to us?

What effects might derive from the complete absence of Aristotle's philosophy?
 
In the absence of the works of Aristotle, those who sought an alternative to Platonism would have had to look elsewhere for inspiration. If they found this in the works of Xenophon, then our civilization would have been enriched by the elevation of the ideal of the thoughtful man of action and the active man of thought. That is, rather than two sets of ideas that appealed to cloistered intellectuals, we would have one school in which men apart from the world embraced airy-fairy mysticism and a competing school in which men involved with the world informed that engagement with well-grounded abstraction. At the same time, we would also enjoy the benefits of a Socratic tradition that was free of Platonic mumbo-jumbo and thus better suited to the education of men of action.
 
I don't have a solid understanding of early philosophers, but i do know this will have a MAJOR knock on effect on the Abrahamic religions. Maybe there will be a few things that get incorporated via alexander, but it will be miniscule compared to his OTL influence on the early Christian church.
 
My discipline, literary theory, might not see such dominant paradigms as the three dramatic units, or literalist meaning. Or maybe it would not develop at all, leaving literature as a social praxis like romantic courtship - widely tried, idealised, but rarely theorised.
 
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