 The great textual recoveries in the Latin West of Greek science, medicine and philosophy of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, generally accompanied by Islamic commentaries, introduced these texts into a theological context that had been strongly defined by Augustinianism and neo-Platonism. The interplay between this pre-existent tradition with new philosophical views defined a complex period of intellectual ferment that defined much of the subsequent intellectual and scientific history of the West (Gaukroger 2006: chp. 2). The sustained efforts of major synthesizers, such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), to bring the massive body of newly-recovered Aristotelian works into dialogue with Christian Neo-Platonism and Augustinianism, demanded new insights into the conception of the soul-body relation, the autonomy of the natural order and the role of secondary causes in the creation of the world.