Philoponus, ‘Alexander’ and the Origins of Medieval Logic 1

Some modern scholars, R. Sorabji prominent among them, are building a heroon for John Philoponus, the man who courageously rebelled against Aristotelian physics and pointed out weaknesses in traditional arguments for the eternity of the world. ² In my mythology he used to be of less than heroic stature; I used to think of him as a chimera, whose head would happily chew away at its own tail, for I knew him only as the author of some generally flaccid commentaries on the Organon ³ whose few interesting statements tend to be mutually inconsistent. But perhaps both views of Philoponus are correct. Professor Sorabji’s heroic inventor of a new physics is the mature scholar who, furthermore, is fired by a crusader’s conviction that he is fighting for truth. My John Chimera is the diffident young assistant professor of logic charged with teaching a subject that he has not quite mastered. He relies on notes taken during professor Ammonius’ lectures, but they are none too good, as, although Ammonius taught many logic classes in his time, he never managed to become really interested in the discipline. Like most of his contemporaries, he just considered acquaintance with the Organon as a stepping-stone on the way to real philosophy.