Peripatetic school used by earlier philosophers such as Socrates. Aristotle and his colleagues first began to use the Lyceum in this way about 335 BC, after which Aristotle left Plato's Academy and Athens, and then returned to Athens from his travels about a dozen years later. Because of the school's association with the gymnasium, the school also came to be referred to simply as the Lyceum. Some modern scholars argue that the school did not become formally institutionalized until Theophrastus took it over, at which time there was private property associated with the school. Originally at least, the Peripatetic gatherings were probably
Peripatetic axiom Peripatetic axiom The Peripatetic axiom is: "Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses" (Latin: ""Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu""). It is found in Thomas Aquinas's "De veritate, q. 2 a. 3 arg. 19". Aquinas adopted this principle from the Peripatetic school of Greek philosophy, established by Aristotle. Aquinas argued that the existence of God could be proved by reasoning from sense data. He used a variation on the Aristotelian notion of the "active intellect" ("intellectus agens") which he interpreted as the ability to abstract universal meanings from particular empirical data.