ABSTRACT
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. Thirteenth-century mainstream philosophy was heavily Aristotle-centred and owed a lot to the late-ancient blend of Aristotelian and Platonic thought – though sometimes by devious ways, such as via Avicenna or Averroes. This chapter contends that late-ancient Greek scholastic writers on logic, John Philoponus among them, contributed both to the rise of a nominalistic current that was strong in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries and to the rise of the realistic current that dominated the thirteenth century. In antiquity, the great era of logic was over by c. 200 bc. Medieval logicians surpassed the ancients, but they were deeply influenced by the men from Porphyry to Philoponus, both in nominalistic periods and in realistic ones.
