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This is a post-Aristotelian Greek philosophical text, written at a crucial moment in the defeat of paganism by Christianity, AD 529, when the Emperor Justinian closed the pagan Neoplatonist school in Athens. Philoponus in Alexandria was a brilliant Christian philosopher, steeped in Neoplatanism, who turned the pagans' ideas against them. Here he attacks the most devout of the earlier Athenian pagan philosophers, Proclus, defending the distinctively Christian view that the universe had a beginning against Proclus' eighteen arguments to the contrary, which are discussed in eighteen chapters....

Until the launch of this series over ten 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. Subjects covered in this, the third and last, volume of translation of this work include: why the elements are four in number; what's wrong with Empedocles' theory of elements; how homogeneous stuffs, particularly the tissues of a living body, come to be and consist of the elements. The volume also contains...

In On The Soul 2.1-6, Aristotle differs from Plato in his account of the soul, by tying it to the body. The soul is the life-manifesting capacities that we all have and that distinguish living things, and explain their behaviour. He defines soul and life by reference to the capacities for using food to maintain structure and reproduce, for perceiving and desiring, and for rational thought. Capacities have to be defined by reference to the objects to which they are directed. The five senses, for example, are defined by reference to their objects which are primarily forms like colour....

This text by Philoponus, the sixth-century commentator on Aristotle, is notable for its informative introduction to psychology, which tells us the views of Philoponus, of his teacher and of later Neoplatonists on our psychological capacities and on mind-body relations. There is an unusual account of how reason can infer a universally valid conclusion from a single instance, and there are inherited views on the roles of intellect and perception in concept formation, and on the human ability to make reasoned decisions, celebrated by Aristotle, but here downgraded. Philoponus attacks Galen's...

This is one of the most interesting of all post-Aristotelian Greek philosophical texts, written at a crucial moment in the defeat of paganism by Christianity, AD 529, when the Emperor Justinian closed the pagan Neoplatonist school in Athens. Philoponus in Alexandria was a brilliant Christian philosopher, steeped in Neoplatonism, who turned the pagans' ideas against them. Here he attacks the most devout of the earlier Athenian pagan philosophers, Proclus, defending the distinctively Christian view that the universe had a beginning against Proclus' eighteen arguments to the contrary, which...

In this, one of the most original ancient texts on sense perception, Philoponus, the sixth century AD commentator on Aristotle, considers how far perceptual processes are incorporeal. Colour affects us in the same way as light which, passing through a stained glass window, affects the air, but colours only the masonry beyond. Sounds and smells are somewhat more physical, travelling most of the way to us with a moving block of air, but not quite all the way. Only the organ of touch takes on the tangible qualities perceived, because reception of sensible qualities in perception is cognitive,...