John Philoponus (Ἰωάννης ὁ Φιλόπονος;
AD. 490–
AD. 570), also known as John the Grammarian or John of
AlexandriaAlexandria , with a population of 4.1 million, is the second-largest city in Egypt, and is the country's largest seaport, serving about 80% of Egypt's imports and exports...
, was a Christian and
Aristotelian commentatorCommentaries on Aristotle refers to the great mass of literature produced, especially in the ancient and medieval world, to explain and clarify the works of Aristotle. The pupils of Aristotle were the first to comment on his writings, a tradition which was continued by the Peripatetic school...
and the author of a considerable number of philosophical treatises and theological works. A rigorous, sometimes polemical writer and an original thinker who was controversial in his own time, John Philoponus broke from the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition, questioning methodology and eventually leading to empiricism in the natural sciences.
He was posthumously condemned as a
hereticA heretic is a person who committed heresy.Heretic m*Heretic , a 1994 game by Raven Software*Heretic II, a 1998 sequel to the aforementioned gameIn literature:* Heretic, an autobiography of Peter Cameron...
by the Orthodox Church in 680-81 because of his tritheistic interpretation of the
TrinityThe Christian doctrine of the Trinity teaches the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. The doctrine states that God is the Triune God, existing as three persons, or in the Greek hypostases, but one being. Each of the persons is understood as having the one...
.
His works were widely printed in Latin translations in Europe from the
15th centuryAs a means of recording the passage of time, the 15th century was the century which lasted from 1401 to 1500.Spanish and Portuguese explorations led to discovery of the Americas and the sea passage along Cape of Good Hope to India for the European civilization...
onwards. His critique of Aristotle in the
PhysicsPhysics is an important work by Aristotle. It is a collection of treatises or lessons that deal with the most general principles of moving things, both living and non-living, rather than physical theories or investigations of the particular contents of the universe...
commentary was a major influence on
Giovanni Pico della MirandolaCount Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of...
and
Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism...
, who cited Philoponus substantially in his works.
Life
Possibly born into a Christian family, nothing is known of his early life. Philoponus studied at the school of
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and began publishing his from about
510-Births:* Gildas, Celtic monk * Emperor Xiaoming of Northern Wei* Emperor Xiaowu of Northern Wei* Empress Yifu-Deaths:* Hashim, great-grandfather of Muhammad and ancestor of the Hashemites...
. He was a pupil and sometime
amanuensisAmanuensis [ipa: əˌmænjuˈɛnsɪs] is a Latin word adopted in various languages, including English, for certain persons performing a function by hand, either writing down the words of another or performing manual labour...
to the Neoplatonic philosopher
AmmoniusAmmonius may refer to:*Ammonius Lithotomos , Greek lithotomist*Ammonius of Athens , philosopher and teacher of Plutarch*Ammonius Saccas , Neoplatonist philosopher and teacher of Plotinus...
, who had studied at Athens under
ProclusProclus Lycaeus , called "The Successor" or "Diadochos" , was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, one of the last major Classical philosophers . He set forth one of the most elaborate and fully developed systems of Neoplatonism...
.
Philoponus’ early writings are based on lectures given by Ammonius, but gradually he established his own independent thinking in his commentaries and critiques of
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
’s
On the SoulOn the Soul is a major treatise by Aristotle on the nature of living things. His discussion centres on the kinds of souls possessed by different kinds of living things, distinguished by their different operations...
and
PhysicsPhysics is an important work by Aristotle. It is a collection of treatises or lessons that deal with the most general principles of moving things, both living and non-living, rather than physical theories or investigations of the particular contents of the universe...
. In the latter work Philoponus became one of the earliest thinkers to reject Aristotle’s dynamics and propose the ‘theory of impetus’: i.e. an object moves and continues to move because of an energy imparted in it by the mover, and ceases movement when that energy is exhausted. In this erroneous but insightful theory can be found the first step towards the concept of
inertiaInertia is the resistance of any physical object, to a change in its state of motion. It is represented numerically by an object's mass. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles of classical physics which are used to describe the motion of matter and how it is affected by...
in modern physics, although Philoponus’ theory was largely ignored at the time because he was too radical in his rejection of Aristotle.
In 529 Philoponus wrote his critique
Against Proclus in which he systematically defeats every argument put forward for the eternity of the world, a theory which formed the basis of pagan attack of the Christian doctrine of
CreationCreation according to Genesis is the account of the creation of the world and of the first man and woman as found in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible....
. The intellectual battle against eternalism became one of Philoponus’ major preoccupations and dominated several of his publications (some now lost) over the following decade.
The style of his commentaries and his conclusions made Philoponus unpopular with his colleagues and fellow philosophers, and he appears to have ceased his study of philosophy around 530, devoting himself to theology instead. Around 550 he wrote a theological work
On the Creation of the World as a commentary on the
BibleThe Bible contains the central religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. Modern Judaism generally recognizes a single set of canonical books known as the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, as it is written almost entirely in the Hebrew language, with some small portions in Aramaic...
’s story of creation using the insights of Greek philosophers and Basil the Great. In this work he transfers his theory of impetus to the motion of the planets, whereas Aristotle had proposed different explanations for the motion of heavenly bodies and for earthly projectiles. Thus Philoponus’ theological work is recognized in the history of science as the first attempt at a unified theory of dynamics. Another of his is major theological concerns was to argue that all material objects were brought into being by God (
Arbiter, 52A-B).
Around 553 Philoponus made some theological contributions to the
Council of ConstantinopleCouncil of Constantinople can refer to:*Council of Constantinople , a local council*First Council of Constantinople, the Second Ecumenical Council, in 381 or 383.*Second Council of Constantinople, the Fifth Ecumenical Council, in 553....
concerning
ChristologyChristology is a field of study within Christian theology which is concerned with the nature of Jesus the Christ, particularly with how the divine and human are related in his person. Christology is generally less concerned with the details of Jesus' life than with how the human and divine...
. His doctrine on Christ’s duality, according to which in Christ remain two united substances, united but divided, is analogous to the union of the soul and body in human beings and coincides with the miaphysite school of thought. He also produced writings on the Trinity around this time.
After his death, John Philoponus was declared to have held heretical views of the Trinity and was made anathema in 680-1. This limited the spread of his ideas in the following centuries, but in his own time and afterwards he was translated into Syriac and Arabic and many of his works continued to persevere and be studied by the Arabs. Some of his works continued to circulate in Europe in Greek or Latin versions, and influenced
BonaventureBonaventure , born John of Fidanza , was an Italian medieval scholastic theologian and philosopher, the eighth Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor. He was a Cardinal Bishop of Albano. He was canonized on 14 April 1482 by Pope Sixtus IV and declared a Doctor of the Church in the year 1588...
. The theory of impetus was taken up by Buridan in the
14th centuryAs a means of recording the passage of time, the 14th century was the century which lasted from 1301 to 1400.-Events:* The transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age...
.
Writings
John Philoponus wrote at least 40 works on a wide array of subjects including grammar, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and theology. The authorship of portions of his work, particularly the third book of
De Anima, is disputed.
Philosophical Commentaries
The commentaries of the late antiquity and early Middle Ages aimed to teach audience. In that regard, the repetitive nature of Philoponus’ commentaries demonstrates his pedagogical awareness. Although in the abstract manner, Philoponus is chiefly focused on the concept in question.
Most of Philoponus’ early philosophical works strive to define the distinction between matter, extension, place and various kinds of change.
For example, the commentary
Against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World represents a standardized description of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Both Aristotle and Philoponus argue that in kinds of change there are differences, in their form and matter.
In
Physics, Aristotle operates with the idea of places, but dismisses the existence of space. The idea that came from Plato and was developed by Aristotle has been evolved by Philoponus. Philoponus attempts to combine the idea of homogeneous space with the Aristotelian system. The argument made by Philoponus is that substances by themselves require some determinate quantity for their being. Similarly to Aristotle, who rejected the immaterial things,and in contrast to Plato whose metaphysics accepted immaterial substances, Philoponus’ concept of substance refers to the material objects.
Concerning the discussion on the space, Philoponus’ claim that from every point in space is possible to draw identical figures, made him to be perceived as an innovative thinker who influenced later Renaissance scholars, for instance, Gianfranceso Pico della Mirandola and
Galileo GalileiGalileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism...
. Thus, Philoponus' idea of perspective signifies the concept of space as immaterial three-dimensional medium in which objects are located.
In the third book of
De Anima, entitled
De Intellectu, Philoponus analyzes the doctrine of the intellect. The author (Philoponus or Pseudo-Philoponus?) sets the theory on the role and functioning of the active intellect . On one hand, there is the active intellect, and on the other, the idea of perception awareness or how we are aware that we are perceiving. In other words, in this reflective philosophy, there is a rationalist conclusion which emphasizes a relation between self and truth which leads to the discussion of the nature of knowledge.
According to this view, the knowledge is identical to its object, since the self-awareness of perception is divorced from the irrational soul.Therefore, the understanding arises through the identification of the intellect and its object. More specifically, perception deals only with material things.
Philoponus has raised the central question of the scientific and philosophical Aristotle’s work on chemistry. The work called
On Generation and Corruption examines the question of how is the mixture (chemical combination) possible? Philoponus’ contribution to the topic is in his new definition of potential, the third of the seven elements criterions. There are various interpretations of the theory of mixture, but it seems that Philoponus is rather refining Aristotle’s approach than rejecting it. One of interpreters of Philophonus’ work on the theory of mixture, De Haas, implies that “no element can possess a quality essential to it except to a superlative extent” .
Theological Treaties
Philoponus’ major Christological work is
Arbiter. The work was written shortly before the
Second Council of ConstantinopleThe Second Council of Constantinople is believed to have been the Fifth Ecumenical Council by the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Old Catholics, and a number of other Western Christian groups. It was held from May 5th to June 2nd, 553, having been called by Emperor Justinian...
of 553 . It became famous in regard to its doctrine on resurrection. Similarly to ideas presented in
Physics, Philoponus in the work titled
Arbiter states that our corrupted bodies (material things) will be eventually brought into being (matter and form) by God .
Historiographical Contribution
Relation to Contemporaries
John Philoponus’ Christological “opus magnum” stands in the line with St. Cyril of Alexandria and
Severus of AntiochSeverus, Patriarch of Antioch , born approximately 465 in Sozopolis in Pisidia, was by birth and education a pagan, who was baptized in the martyrium of Leontius at Tripolis.- Life :...
. Philoponus asserted the understanding of Christ as a divine and a human, in opposition to
ChalcedonianChalcedonian describes churches and theologians which accept the definition given at the Council of Chalcedon of how the divine and human relate in the person of Jesus Christ...
authors who strove to reach a middle ground.
Influence on Later History Writing
Philoponus’ view of space as homogeneity is influenced by the Hellenic teaching of Aristotle. However, Philoponus and his contemporaries,
Simplicius of CiliciaSimplicius of Cilicia, lived c. 490-c. 560 AD, was a disciple of Ammonius and Damascius, and was one of the last of the Neoplatonists. He was one of the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the Persian court, before being...
and Strato developed this concept further . This concept guided the
RenaissanceThe Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe...
theory of perspective, particularly the one highlighted by Leon Battista Alberti, and other architectural masters.
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