John Philoponus

John Philoponus was a Byzantine Greek philologist, Aristotelian commentator, Christian theologian and an author of a considerable number of philosophical treatises and theological works. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and studied there under the celebrated Neoplatonist philosopher Ammonius Hermiae. He was a rigorous, sometimes polemical writer and an original thinker who was controversial in his own time. He broke from the Aristotelian–Neoplatonic tradition, questioning its methodology and leading to empiricism in the natural sciences. He was one of the first to propose a theory of impetus similar to the modern concept of inertia over Aristotelian dynamics. He also argued against the eternity of the world, a theory which formed the basis of pagan attacks on the Christian doctrine of Creation. He wrote on Christology and was posthumously condemned as a heretic by the Church in 680–81 because of what was perceived as a tritheistic interpretation of the Trinity. His by-name ὁ Φιλόπονος translates as "lover of toil", i.e. "diligent," referring to a miaphysite confraternity in Alexandria, the philoponoi, who were active in debating pagan (i.e. Neoplatonic) philosophers. His posthumous condemnation limited the spread of his writing, but copies of his work, The contra Aristotelem, resurfaced in medieval Europe, through translations from Arabic of his quotes included in the work of Simplicius of Cilicia, which was debated in length by Muslim philosophers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali and later Averroes, influencing Bonaventure and Buridan in Christian Western Europe, but also Rabbanite Jews such as Maimonides and Gersonides, who also used his arguments against their Karaite rivals.