EMA 16.5 | How Aristotle Became the Intellectual Father of Three Religions

Описание: A pagan Greek philosopher who worshipped Zeus became the shared intellectual foundation of medieval Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. This video traces how Aristotle's concept of God as a Prime Mover — a rational designer who sets the universe in motion but does not intervene — gave three rival faiths a common framework for reconciling reason with revelation. Follow the remarkable transmission chain from Greek to Arabic to Latin, and meet the three thinkers who made it happen: Averroes, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas.

Key concepts covered:

• Aristotle's scope and method compared to Plato — why his encyclopedic, observation-based approach made him uniquely useful to theologians
• The Prime Mover: Aristotle's concept of God as a cosmic designer, not a personal deity — and the watchmaker analogy that illustrates it
• Deism vs. theism: the distinction between a creator who designs the universe and one who actively intervenes in it
• Averroes (Ibn Rushd), born 1126 in Cordoba — the greatest medieval commentator on Aristotle, who argued philosophy and revelation are two paths to the same truth
• Maimonides, born 1135 in Cordoba — whose Guide for the Perplexed reconciled Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish scripture
• Thomas Aquinas, born 1225 in Italy — whose Summa Theologica systematically fused Aristotelian reason with Christian faith
• The Greek-to-Arabic-to-Latin transmission chain: how Baghdad's House of Wisdom preserved Aristotle, how Islamic scholars expanded on his ideas, and how translation schools in Toledo delivered them to Christian Europe
• Why Aquinas never read a word of Aristotle in Greek — and the historical irony that the greatest Christian philosopher depended on Muslim scholarship
• Three modern takeaways: ideas cross religious boundaries, the "clash of civilizations" narrative ignores centuries of shared intellectual exchange, and the reason-versus-faith debate is far older than most people realize

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SOURCE MATERIALS
The source materials for this video are from    • 16. The Early Middle Ages, 284--1000: The ...