The philosophy of the commentators, 200-600 AD

the long version

The physics of the commentators was innovative: the Neoplatonists thought that the world of space and time was causally ordered by a nonspatial, nontemporal world, and this view required orignal thinking. Of the sixth-century Neoplatonists, Simplicius considered his teacher's ideas on space and time to be unprecedented, and Philoponus revised Aristotelianism to produce a new physics built around the Christian belief in God's Creation of the world. The thinkers of the Middle Ages borrowed from Philoponus and other commentators the proofs of a finite past, the idea of degrees of latitude in change and mixture, and in dynamics the idea of impetus and the defense of motion in a vacuum. -- Back cover.