Peripatetic

Adj. walking or traveling about; itinerant.
Noun. a person who walks or travels about.

Peripatetic was my word of the day from Dictionary.com yesterday. That being said, it was already one of my favorite words. It brings to mind the walkabout, Kerouac and cross-country journeys, placing trust in where the day may take you. I knew the definitions listed above. I did not know what came next:

Peripatetic (initial letter capitalized)
Adj. of or pertaining to Aristotle, who taught philosophy while walking in the Lyceum of ancient Athens. Of or pertaining to the Aristotelian school of philosophy.

There is an alternate theory that the Peripatetics take their name not from the fact that Aristotle was walking and teaching, but rather from the peripatoi (colonnades) where they were wandering. But that is neither here nor there.

Here's where I am wandering with this word. I remember being told, years ago, that I must not believe in God since I was a philosophy major. I took offense at this. The writings of Aristotle, a philosopher, had a large impact on St. Thomas Aquinas, and led to the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The comment was highly uninformed, made by a person who saw philosophy as antithetical to religion. (This person gets to join the head-in-the-sand brigade, and gets lumped in along with the many people I have come across who still deny that Jesus was Jewish.) The relation between philosophy and religion is complicated and thorny, but undeniable.

It always strikes me how Aristotle turns up at the base of everywhere you look. Optics, biology, medicine, politics, ethics, Christian theology, Islamic philosophy- all take jumping points from various pieces of his work, despite how wrong he was about so many things (his low opinion of women jumps to my mind just now.) Aristotle's teachings have been loved and hated throughout time, dropped for centuries at a time, and then rediscovered during periods of classical revival. People, by and large, don't realize this, though. They fail to see unifying elements where they don't want them to be. They fail to see the progression from one point to another.

They don't let their minds wander sufficiently, perhaps.