 Nevertheless, Ober’s observation rings true more broadly for the historical significance of Aristotle’s political thought. The medieval rediscovery in the West of the full Greek texts of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics and their translation into Latin in the thirteenth century served as a basis for reconceiving civic life as valuable on the basis of reason independent of revelation. Thus 1260 – the date of William of Moerbeke’s complete Latin translation of the Politics—symbolizes a fundamental turning point in political philosophy, one in which Aristotelian philosophy would be widely deployed within certain strands of thought of the Catholic Church, while also inspiring a wide range of philosophical movements and later becoming the target of others. Indeed, modern debates over the meaning of Aristotle find him a precursor of or inspiration for a range of intellectual and political positions: Aristotle as a communitarian (MacIntyre 1984) vs. Aristotle as an exponent of class conflict (Yack 1993); Aristotle as a democrat, or at least as providing the basis for democracy (Frank 2005), vs. Aristotle in opposition to Athenian democracy in his day (Ober 1998). One interesting development has been the use of Aristotle to articulate an ethics of capability (Nussbaum 1993). In evaluating Aristotle’s political thought, it is important to distinguish between modern democratic assumptions and his own starting points, many of which were in tension with the democracies of his own time.