John Philoponus

John Philoponus (“the lover of toil”) was the great Christian Aristotelian of sixth-century Alexandria — a pupil in the school of Ammonius and a commentator of formidable range, who turned the tools of the pagan schools against one of their central doctrines.

Against the Aristotelian teaching of an eternal cosmos, defended in his own day by Simplicius, Philoponus argued that the world was created and had a beginning. In physics he rejected the claim that heavier bodies fall faster, and replaced the old theory of motion with an early notion of impressed force — the “impetus” later taken up in the Latin Middle Ages.

Standing between the pagan Neoplatonism of Proclus and the science of a later age, he is a hinge figure: the last great Alexandrian commentator and, in his physics, a herald of much that was to come.