Ioannis Grammatici Cognomento Philoponi Eruditissima Commentaria in Primos Quatuor Aristotelis De Naturali Auscultatione Libros. Nunc Primum E Graeco in Latinum Fideliter Translata.

John Philoponus.; Guglielmo Doroteo; Aristoteles

Venetiis: Brandinus & Octavianus Scotus, 1542

Folio. [2], 85p, 48p, [1]. Bound in modern leather. 4 raised bands. Gilt title to second compartment. Printers imprint to final leaf. Fine binding and cover. New FFEP. Marginal dampstain throughout.  Otherwise, clean, unmarked pages.

John Philoponus, also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria, was a Christian and Aristotelian commentator and the author of a considerable number of philosophical treatises and theological works. A rigorous, sometimes polemical writer and an original thinker who was controversial in his own time, John Philoponus broke from the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition, questioning methodology and eventually leading to empiricism in the natural sciences. He established his own independent thinking in his commentaries and critiques of Aristotle's On the Soul and Physics. In the latter work Philoponus became one of the earliest thinkers to reject Aristotle's dynamics and propose the 'theory of impetus': i.e., an object moves and continues to move because of an energy imparted in it by the mover, and ceases movement when that energy is exhausted, an early that was the first step towards the concept of inertia in modern physics.

His works were widely printed in Latin translations in Europe from the 15th century onwards. 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, often citing him more than Plato. Philoponus' main significance in the history of science lies in his being, at the close of antiquity, the first thinker to undertake a comprehensive and massive attack on the principal tenets of Aristotle's physics and cosmology, an attack unequaled in thoroughness until Galileo. 

LC: Adams P1058