Books by John Philoponus

This series translates the 15,000 pages of philosophical writings by the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, written mainly between 200 and 600 AD. Now translated into English, these works include introductions, notes and comprehensive indexes, filling a gap in the history of European thought.

Paul Lettinck has restored a lost text of Philoponus by translating it for the first time from Arabic (only limited fragments have survived in the original Greek). The text, recovered from annotations in an Arabic translation of Aristotle, is an abridging paraphrase of Philoponus'' commentary on Physics Books 5-7, with two final comments on Book 8. The Simplicius text, which consists of his comments on Aristotle''s treatment of the void in chapters 6-9 of Book 4 of the Physics, comes from Simplicius'' huge commentary on Book 4. Simplicius'' comments on Aristotle''s treatment of place and time have been translated by J. O. Urmson in two earlier volumes of this series.

In the Corollaries on Place and Void, Philoponus attacks Aristotle's conception of place as two-dimensional, adopting instead the view more familiar to us that it is three-dimensional, inert and conceivable as void. Philoponus' denial that velocity in the void would be infinite anticipated Galileo, as did his denial that speed of fall is proportionate to weight, which Galileo greatly developed. In the second document Simplicius attacks a lost treatise of Philoponus which argued for the Christians against the eternity of the world. He exploits Aristotle's concession that the world contains only finite power. Simplicius' presentation of Philoponus' arguments (which may well be tendentious), together with his replies, tell us a good deal about both Philosophers.