system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
MacIntyre said St. Thomas was "In many respects a better Aristotlean than Aristotle." Are there any philosophers who also satisfy this formulation of being "a better Xian than X"?
gpt
Lots of people seem to be better Platonists than Plato, if only because it's deeply unclear which of the doctrines that came to be called "Platonism" Plato actually believed.

Plenty of people in 19th-century Germany certainly thought they were better Kantians than Kant. And he's so easily caricatured in his ethical thought that sometimes you get philosophers mounting criticisms of the "Kantians" while admitting that those criticisms may not apply to the more nuanced positions that Kant himself held. The same kind of thing sometimes happens with Hegel. 

Then you get people in the Marxist tradition who talk about how for major theorists "Xism" (usually Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism when it comes up) doesn't mean "what X thought" but instead means "a branch of revolutionary thought that builds primarily on X's work, but receives its mature formulation from people other than X."