John Philoponus: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

His posthumous condemnation limited the spread of his writing, but copies of his work, Contra Aristotelem, resurfaced in medieval Europe, through translations from Arabic of his quotes included in the work of Simplicius of Cilicia, which was debated in length by Muslim philosophers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali and later Averroes, influencing Bonaventure and Buridan in Christian Western Europe, but also Rabbanite Jews such as Maimonides and Gersonides, who also used his arguments against their Karaite rivals. His work was largely debated in the Arabic scholarly tradition, where he is known as Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī (i.e. "John the Grammarian"), and his views against Aristotelian physics were defended by philosophers at the court of Fatimid Imam Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, particularly Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, who debated Avicenna on the topic, and Hamza ibn Ali. His critique of Aristotle in the Physics commentary was a major influence on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Galileo Galilei, who cited Philoponus substantially in his works.