John Philoponus

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John Philoponus (also known as "Joannes Philoponus", "John the Grammarian", and "John of Alexandria") was an important philosopher in the 6th century AD, living from about 490 to about 570. 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.

He is credited with establishing some of the foundations for modern, more critical thought and scientific analysis, breaking with some of the more flawed aspects of Aristotelian and Platonic logic by disproving their theory of gravity.

As regards the natural motion of bodies falling through a medium, Aristotle's verdict that the speed is proportional to the weight of the moving bodies and indirectly proportional to the density of the medium is disproved by Philoponus through appeal to the same kind of experiment that Galileo Galilei was to carry out centuries later - Theory of Impetus - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

He was a Greek philosopher of Alexandria who lived in the later part of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th century. The name Grammaticus he assumed in virtue of his lectures on language and literature; the name Philoponus came from the large number of treatises he composed (it means lover of toil). 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 has sometimes been accused of opportunism but was manifestly Christian from an early age (preceding Justinian's closure of the Athenian schools).

Starting around 1200, his work was rediscovered and it influenced thinkers such as: Bonaventure, Gersonides, Buridan, Oresme, and Galileo.