Texts That Bring Aristotle to Life: A Speculative Bibliography

The Speculative Aristotle: Part IV

[This is the fourth installment in a series. The previous posts can be found here, here, and here. I hope to continue to develop my revisionary reading of Aristotle in future posts, but due to a few insistent inquiries I am publishing now the bibliography I promised at the end of the series. This is a guide to the secondary scholarship, intended for someone who has read some Aristotle and is intrigued by the reading I’ve been defending here. If your knowledge of Aristotle is more rudimentary, consider picking up Jonathan Lear’s Aristotle: The Desire to Understand first.]

Key:

† = Dalhousie Classics

‡ = Tübingen/Milan Interpretation of Plato

‖ = Pittsburgh/Leipzig/Chicago School

Background: The Basic Unity of Platonic and Aristotelian Philosophy

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. Yale University Press, 1986.

Corrigan, Kevin. “The Place and Scope of Participation in the Divine in the Thought of Plato and Aristotle.” In: A Less Familiar Plato: From Phaedo to Philebus. Cambridge Studies in Religion and Platonism. Cambridge University Press; 2023:49-92.

Diamond, Eli. “Aristotle’s Appropriation of Plato’s Sun Analogy in De Anima.” Apeiron 47, no. 3 (2014): 356-389.†

Gerson, Lloyd P. Aristotle and Other Platonists. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Plato’s Principles (The So-Called “Unwritten Doctrines”)

Krämer, Hans Joachim. “Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine.” In The Other Plato : The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s Inner-Academic Teachings: 65-82. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2013.‡

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic.” In Dialectic and Dialogue: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato: 124-155. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

Doull, James. “Findlay and Plato.” In Studies in the Philosophy of J.N. Findlay, eds. Robert S. Cohen, Richard M. Martin and Merold Westphal, 250-262. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985.†

Krämer, Hans Joachim. Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics : A Work on the Theory of the Principles and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents. Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1990.‡

Nikulin, Dmitri, ed. The Other Plato : The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s Inner-Academic Teachings. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2013.‡

O’Brien, Carl Séan. Plato’s Unwritten Doctrines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.‡

Reale, Giovanni. Toward a New Interpretation of Plato. Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 1997.‡

The Transition: From Plato to Aristotle

Diamond, Eli. “Embodied Essence, Two-Footedness, and the Animal with Logos.” In Aristotle on Human Nature : The Animal with Logos, 21-38. Edited by Gregory Kirk and Joseph Arel. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.†

House, Dennis. “Did Aristotle Understand Plato?” Dionysius 17 (1999): 7-25 https://ojs.library.dal.ca/dionysius/article/view/6238†

Chiurazzi, Gaetano. Dynamis: Ontology of the Incommensurable. Translated by Robert T. Valgenti. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2021.

Mann, Wolfgang-Rainer. The Discovery of Things: Aristotle’s Categories and Their Context. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Correctives to the Scholarship: The Dynamic, Speculative, and Theological Aristotle

Kosman, Aryeh. “Preface.” In The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Sachs, Joe. “Introduction.” In Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 1999.

Diamond, Eli. Mortal Imitations of Divine Life : The Nature of the Soul in Aristotle’s De Anima. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2015.†

Kosman, Aryeh. Virtues of Thought: Essays on Plato and Aristotle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Lear, Jonathan. Aristotle: The Desire to Understand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.‖

On Hegel’s Aristotle

Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the History of Philosophy: 1825–26. Trans. and ed. Robert F. Brown, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 234ff.

Mure, G.R.G. An Introduction to Hegel.

Mure, G.R.G. A Study of Hegel’s Logic.

Gérard, G. (2012). Hegel, Reader of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Substance as Subject. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, No 74(2), 195-223. https://doi.org/10.3917/rmm.122.0195.

Ferrarin, Alfredo. Hegel and Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Pippin, Robert. Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

The Doullian Reading of Aristotle

Bruce-Robertson, Lawrence. “An Introduction to James Doull’s Interpretation of Aristotle.” Animus: the Canadian Journal of Philosophy and the Humanities 10 (2005): 17-29.†

Doull, James. “The Christian Origin of Contemporary Instutitions.” Dionysius 6 (1982), 125-127, 141-151.†

Bruce-Robertson, Lawrence. “A Commentary on Book Alpha Elatton of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.” Master’s thesis. Dalhousie University, 1998.†

Johnston, Angus. “A Commentary on the First Two Books of Aristotle’s Physics.” PhD dissertation. Dalhousie University, 1985.†

Johnston, Angus. “The Simple Bodies As Unities Of Quantity And Quality In Aristotle’s On Generation And Corruption.” In Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Thought. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007.

Simcha Walfish, “An Instructive Failure: The Status of Anaxagoras in Plato’s Phaedo and Parmenides, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book A.” Pseudo-Dionysius 15 (2013): 1-9.

Hegelian Neo-Aristotelianism

Rödl, Sebastian. “Sebastian Rödl.” Interview. Into the Coast. https://www.intothecoast.com/sebastian-rodl.‖

Kern, Andrea. “Life and Mind: Varieties of Neo-Aristotelianism: Naive, Sophisticated, Hegelian.” Hegel Bulletin 41, no. 1 (2020): 40–60.‖

Rödl, Sebastian. “Hegelian Dialectics and Aristotle’s Stufenleiter of Life.” Unpublished manuscript.‖

Rödl, Sebastian. Gut und Böse: Eine Dialektische Ethik. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2025. (translation rights to Harvard University Press).‖

Rödl, Sebastian. Self-Consciousness and Objectivity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.‖

Suther, Jensen. True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.‖

Other Speculative/Theological Readings of Aristotle

Diamond, Eli. “The Trinitarian Structure of Aristotle’s Living God and Its Mortal Imitations.” Presentation. Delivered at 37th Annual Atlantic Theological Conference. Halifax, Nova Scotia, June 21st 2017. Unpublished manuscript.†

Ziguras, Jakob. “Aristotle: Metaphysics as Theanthropology,” Kronos Philosophical Journal, 2018, VII. https://share.google/b7WOg5KV6FFbNzTlA.

Ziguras, Jakob. Aristotle’s Rational Empiricism: A Goethean Interpretation of Aristotle’s Theory of Knowledge. Dissertation. University of Sydney, 2010.

The Historical Legacy of Speculative Aristotelianism

Booth, Edward. Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers. Cambridge University Press; 1983.

Booth, Edward. “St. Augustine’s ‘notitia sui’ related to Aristotle and the early neo-Platonists.” Augustiniana 27:70-132, 364-401 (1977), 28:183-221 (1978), 29:97-124 (1979). .

Cory, Therese. Knowing is Being: Aquinas’s Metaphysical Model of Mind. Forthcoming.

Doull, James. “The Christian Origin of Contemporary Instutitions.” Dionysius 6:111-165 (1982), 8:53-103 (1984).†

Doull, James. “Neoplatonism and the Origin of the Cartesian Subject.” Animus 4:78-107 (1999).†

Flasch, Kurt. Meister Eckhart: Philosopher of Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.