John Philoponus
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John Philoponus (ca. 490–ca. 570 CE) (also known as "Joannes Philoponus", "John the Grammarian", and "John of Alexandria") was an Alexandrian philosopher and early critic of Aristotle from Byzantine Egypt. His work was placed under an anathema in 681 and was ignored for the next 600 years. He is not to be confused with Patriarch John VII of Constantinople also known as "John the Grammarian", who was the last Iconoclast Patriarch of Constantinople and ejected from office in 843.
The name Grammaticus he assumed in virtue of his lectures on language and literature; the name Philoponus ("lover of toil") came from the large number of treatises he composed. He was a pupil of Ammonius Hermiae, and is supposed to have written the life of Aristotle. Philoponus wrote at least 40 works on theology and philosophy.
Important writings of Philoponus consist of commentaries on Aristotle. These include works on the Physica, the Prior and the Posterior Analytics, the Meteorologica, the De anima, the De generatione animalium, the De generatione et interitu and the Metaphysica. These date essentially from Philoponus' youth (whereas later works are cosmological and theological in content). They have been frequently edited and are interesting in connection with the adoption of Aristotelianism by the Western Church.
Philoponus took issue with Athenian Neoplatonists on the doctrine of creation. He argued on philosophical (in contrast to revealed) grounds, against the dominant Greek philosophical tradition, that the universe must be temporally finite.[1]
He has sometimes been accused of opportunism but was manifestly Christian from an early age (preceding Justinian's closure of the Athenian schools). Later theological work of Philoponus reveals an involvement with the tritheist movemement which affected monophysite circles in Egypt and Syria.
Starting around 1200, his work was rediscovered and it influenced thinkers such as: Bonaventure, Gersonides, Buridan, Oresme, Galileo, and T. F. Torrance.
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[edit] References
- ^ Baldner and Carroll, Aquinas on Creation, 11
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
[edit] Further reading
- Max Jammer (1993). "The Emancipation of the Space concept from Aristotelianism", Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics. Courier Dover Publications, 53–94. ISBN 0486271196.
- Richard Sorabji John Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian science Cornell University Press 1993
