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?
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?