: the philosophy of Aristotle that elaborates the fundamental principles of formal logic especially through the doctrine of the syllogism and holds that all reality is of particular things each of which is the union of matter and a form which is characteristic of its kind except that God is pure actuality, being the unmoved mover and unchanging cause of all change, and except that prime matter is pure potentiality compare category, catharsis, cause, form, matter, predicable
2
: a philosophy incorporating essential features of that of Aristotle with usually the inclusion of factors stemming from later ideological traditions
a mystical Aristotelianism also got into parts of the Jewish Cabala—S. P. Lamprecht
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