 To the extent that Luther is critical of philosophy and of reason, this hostility is often directed at Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition in particular; and in general, Luther’s departure from Aristotle marks one of the most philosophically distinctive and interesting aspects of his thinking. As with Luther’s critique of reason, however, some of his more notoriously negative judgements—such as his claim in the Disputation Against Scholastic Theology that “the whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light” (1517, WA 1:226/LW 31:12)—need to be balanced against other more positive judgements, and set in context. Part of that context is the reception of Aristotle’s work itself, as it was interpreted in its own terms, and also placed against the background of Christian thought within the scholastic tradition, where it can be a complex matter to place Luther himself into these debates (see Andreatta 1996, White 1996, Dieter 2001 (discussed in Wicks 2007), Dieter 2017).