The original meaning of the word peripatos was "a covered walking place." The house that Theophrastus provided for the school of Aristotle contained such a peripatos. This yielded a proper name for the school itself—the Peripatos—and its members came to be known as "those from the Peripatos" or "Peripatetics." This derivation should be preferred to that previously current, according to which the term "Peripatetic" referred to a method of teaching while walking about, known to have been used by Protagoras, for example, and assumed to have been adopted by Aristotle. Although this view goes back to Hermippus at the end of the third century BCE, it is now generally regarded as a mistaken inference, based on nothing more than the name itself.

The history of the Peripatetics can be divided into two periods—that immediately following the death of Aristotle and that following the revival of...