Philoponus has been identified as the founder in dynamics of the theory of impetus, an inner force impressed from without, which, in its later recurrence, has been hailed as a scientific revolution. His commentary is translated here without the previously translated excursus, the Corollary on Void, also available in this series. Philoponus rejects Aristotle's attack on the very idea of void and of the possibility of motion in it, even though he thinks that void never occurs in fact. Philoponus' argument was later to be praised by Galileo. This volume contains the first English translation of Philoponus' commentary, as well as a detailed introduction, extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.

Philoponus has been identified as the founder in dynamics of the theory of impetus, an inner force impressed from without, which, in its later recurrence, has been hailed as a scientific revolution. His commentary is translated here without the previously translated excursus, the Corollary on Void, also available in this series. Philoponus rejects Aristotle's attack on the very idea of void and of the possibility of motion in it, even though he thinks that void never occurs in fact. Philoponus' argument was later to be praised by Galileo. This volume contains the first English translation of Philoponus' commentary, as well as a detailed introduction, extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.

Until the launch of this series over fifteen years ago, the 15,000 volumes of the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, written mainly between 200 and 600 AD, constituted the largest corpus of extant Greek philosophical writings not translated into English or other European languages. In this, the first half of Philoponus' analysis of book one of Aristotle's Physics, the principal themes are metaphysical. Aristotle's opening chapter in the Physics is an abstract reflection on methodology for the investigation of nature, or 'physics'. Aristotle suggests that one must proceed from things that are familiar but vague, and derive more precise but less obvious principles to constitute genuine knowledge. His controversial claim that this is to progress from the universal to the more particular occasions extensive apologetic exegesis, typical of Philoponus' meticulous and somewhat pedantic method. Philoponus explains away the apparent conflict between the 'didactic method' (unavoidable in physics) and the strict demonstrative method described in the Analytics. After 20 pages on Chapter 1, Philoponus devotes the remaining 66 pages to Aristotle's objections to two major Presocratic thinkers, Parmenides and Melissus. Aristotle included these thinkers as an aside, because they were not engaged in physics, but in questioning the very basis of physics. Philoponus investigates Aristotle's claims about the relation between a science and its axioms, explores alternative ways of formalising Aristotle's refutation of Eleatic monism and provides a sustained critique of Aristotle's analysis of the Eleatics' purported mistakes about unity and being.

Explores a range of questions about the basic structure of reality, the nature of prime matter, the principles of change, the relation between form and matter, and the issue of whether things can come into being out of nothing, and if so, in what sense that is true.

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 this, the first half of Philoponus' analysis of book one of "Aristotle's Physics", the principal themes are metaphysical. Philoponus explains the apparent conflict between the 'didactic method' and the strict demonstrative method described in the "Analytics".

Philoponus has been identified as the founder in dynamics of the theory of impetus, an inner force impressed from without, which, in its later recurrence, has been hailed as a scientific revolution. His commentary is translated here without the previously translated excursus, the Corollary on Void, also available in this series. Philoponus rejects Aristotle's attack on the very idea of void and of the possibility of motion in it, even though he thinks that void never occurs in fact. Philoponus' argument was later to be praised by Galileo. This volume contains the first English translation of Philoponus' commentary, as well as a detailed introduction, extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.

Aristotle's account of place, in which he defined a thing's place as the inner surface of its nearest immobile container, was supported by the Latin Middle Ages, even 1600 years after his death, though it had not convinced many ancient Greek philosophers. The sixth century commentator Philoponus took a more common-sense view. For him, place was an immobile three-dimensional extension, whose essence did not preclude its being empty, even if for other reasons it had always to be filled with body. However, Philoponus reserved his own definition for an excursus, already translated in this series, The Corollary on Place. In the text translated here he wanted instead to explain Aristotle's view to elementary students. The recent conjecture that he wished to attract young fellow Christians away from the official pagan professor of philosophy in Alexandria has the merit of explaining why he expounds Aristotle here, rather than attacking him. But he still puts the students through their paces, for example when discussing Aristotle's claim that place cannot be a body, or two bodies would coincide. This volume contains an English translation of Philoponus' commentary, as well as a detailed introduction, extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.

This is the first translation into English of the sixth-century philosopher Philoponus' commentary on Aristotle Physics, book four, chapters one to five.

Philoponus' commentary on the last part of Aristotle's Physics Book 4 does not offer major alternatives to Aristotle's science, as did his commentary on the earlier parts, concerning place, vacuum and motion in a vacuum. Aristotle's subject here is time, and his treatment of it had led to controversy in earlier writers. Philoponus does offer novelties when he treats motion round a bend as in one sense faster than motion on the straight over the same distance in the same time, because of the need to consider the greater effort involved. And he points out that in an earlier commentary on Book 8 he had argued against Aristotle for the possibility of a last instant of time. This volume contains an English translation of Philoponus' commentary, as well as a detailed introduction, extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.