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Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher who lived in the 300s B.C. His ideas had a profound influence on medieval Islamic and Christian scholars. Much of Aristotle's thinking was based on analysis and observation. He explored principles of logic, and he studied the natural world. He also speculated about morality and about the nature of existence.

Aristotle's approach was attractive to many medieval thinkers, who appreciated his logic and attention to detail. It was also threatening because his ideas appeared to challenge religious writings and beliefs; Aristotle did not even mention God in his work. Muslim scholars wrote works that developed Aristotle's ideas further, making them more compatible with Islam. In Western Europe, a movement called Scholasticism developed, in which scholars tried to show that Aristotle's thought could support Christianity.

Two of Aristotle's works were of particular importance in the Middle Ages because of their relation to religious themes. In Metaphysics, where he discusses existence, Aristotle examines the idea of a supreme intellect. This supreme intellect had attributes that many medieval thinkers equated with God. Aristotle also suggests in this work that there was a "first mover" who set the universe in motion. In On the Soul, Aristotle describes ideas about human knowledge to explain how people come to know universal truths. Because Aristotle suggests that there is a human soul that is not made of matter, medieval scholars used his ideas in debates on the immortality of the soul.

In the Byzantine world, Aristotle's ideas influenced Christian theology as early as the 400s. By the 800s, there was an Aristotelian Christian movement that continued through the 1100s. Arab scholars learned about Aristotle from the Byzantines. In the 800s, his works were translated into Arabic, and noted scholars developed his ideas in their own writings - al- Farabi in Syria in the early 900s, IbnSina in Iran around 1000, and Ibn Rushed in Spain in the late 1100s. Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher who lived in North Africa in the late 1100s, also explored Aristotle's thinking.

Some of Aristotle's works on logic were known in the West, largely through Latin translations by a Roman scholar of the early 500s named Boethius. But during the early Middle Ages, Western scholars largely ignored Aristotle's work. In the late 1000s, the philosopher Peter Abelard took a logical approach to theology based on Boethius, but it was not until the era of the crusades that interest in Aristotle blossomed.

Increased contact with the East and with the Muslims of Spain made people in the Western Christian world aware of the works in Arabic, and scholars went to Constantinople to translate the original Greek. This coincided with the founding of the first universities at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. Scholasticism began to gain momentum in the West. Between 1250 and 1350, many Western interpretations of Aristotle were developed. The theologians Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas used Aristotelian ideas in their works on Christian theology. The English Franciscan John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham proposed new interpretations of Aristotle. Aristotle's work exerted a tremendous influence on later medieval thought, and it continued to be important well beyond the Middle Ages.

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