Abstract
Reviewed by: Michael Hunter, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
In this book, Craig Martin gives an account of medieval and Renaissance views of Aristotle and their seventeenth-century legacy. The exposition is clear, though it suffers throughout from a proneness to a slightly catalogue-like mode of exposition, combined with a relentless emphasis on the complexity of the relationship of the various thinkers surveyed both with Aristotle’s legacy and with their own religious and intellectual context. Also notable is the author’s proclivity to play down the heterodoxy of authors like Pomponazzi and even Vanini.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the book is the importance that is attached to Averroes and to attitudes towards him. As is shown here, Averroes’ work was central to Renaissance views of Aristotelianism, while a slightly surprising epilogue is provided by his continuing significance for Pierre Bayle and Thomas Tryon in the late seventeenth century. As the book’s title implies, its emphasis is less on the technical aspects of Aristotle’s legacy than on the theological implications of his work, particularly in relation to such issues as the immortality of the soul, though inevitably the two get somewhat confused in the course of the exposition. Seventeenth-century views of Aristotle are presented in the context of earlier developments, and particularly the extent to which Aristotle was disapproved of on religious grounds. This is illuminating in certain respects, but less so in others. Indeed, it is in its chapters on the seventeenth century that one becomes most aware of the extent to which the book’s approach is potentially misleading in terms of understanding attitudes to Aristotelianism as whole. In the case of Robert Boyle, for instance, it seems strange that there is not even an allusion to his seminal work, The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666), while Descartes is surprisingly lacking in prominence.
For all the value of the book’s recapitulation of the anti-Aristotelian tropes of earlier generations in a seventeenth-century context, there is a danger of these being invested with undue significance at a time when natural philosophers were relentlessly challenging the intelligibility of Aristotelian conceptions of nature. This section of the book also contains a few errors and is somewhat random in its citation of secondary literature, reflecting the fact that the author seems more at home in the medieval and Renaissance sections which dominate the book. Overall, Subverting Aristotle is an erudite but slightly disappointing work.