"The importance of Philoponus, well until the time of Galileo, cannot be underestimated as the scholarly and interesting chapters in this book demonstrate." -- William R. Shea, Galileo Chair, University of Padua, Italy "Natural philosophy in late antiquity, just like influence of this philosophy on medieval and early modern thinking is a sadly neglected field in scholarly literature. John Philoponus was a leading figure in Neoplatonism and his views on physics, especially on the nature of motion, were innovative. The volume is neatly arranged and contains many excellent analyses. As a result, it conveys important new insights, not only on Philoponus' theory, but also on the theoretical context within which it was received in later times." -- Peter Lautner, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest "John Philoponus is widely regarded as one of the most important Peripatetic commentators who followed in the wake of Ammonius of Alexandria and as a highly original speculative thinker in his own right. He is also a figure whose large body of works remains relatively understudied despite efforts made especially since the 1980s to bring him into sharper focus.

A similarly understudied but directly relevant piece of the overall puzzle is that of Philoponus' philosophical influence after ca. 570 CE, which extended from the Arab world to medieval Byzantium, the Latin Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. The thirteen chapters comprising this volume mark an important and tightly orchestrated advance in charting the Fortleben of Philoponus' natural philosophy from Philoponus himself to Galileo." -- John Magee, Professor, Department of Classics, University of Toronto "Philoponus was one of the earliest philosophers to approach Christian revelation from the standpoint of Aristotelian philosophy. In doing so, he cleared new paths in the physical sciences, especially in regard to the questions of whether the world had a temporal beginning, whether the celestial realm is constituted by the same kind of matter as the terrestrial, and what causes those motions that we call) inertial. His analyses had an important impact on how medieval and Renaissance natural philosophers approached these same issues. Together, the papers in Vimercati's important collection present a clear, comprehensive, and often innovative account of how this is so." --Owen Goldin, Marquette University, USA.