2025.02.17 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Manfred Svensson, The Aristotelian Tradition in Early Modern Protestantism: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Commentaries on the Ethics and the Politics, Oxford University Press, 2024, 212pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780197752968.
Reviewed by Tomás Antonio Valle, University of Hamburg
This monograph provides a compact thematic overview of an understudied and often misunderstood terrain, the ethical and political thought of early modern Protestant Aristotelians. Indeed, the topic might appear to many readers as a contradiction in terms: didn’t the Reformation throw out Aristotle along with the whole baggage of medieval scholasticism? After all, Martin Luther not only wrote a “Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” but in it called Aristotle himself “the worst enemy of grace” (46). Even for well-informed readers, aware that Luther’s younger colleague Philipp Melanchthon quickly returned Aristotle to his central place in higher education, there is likely a subsequent blank space of about one or two centuries, until someone (say, Leibniz or Kant) decidedly more modern, less Aristotelian, and less blatantly Protestant bursts…
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