Broadie Sarah (ed.). Philoponus: On Aristotle Physics 4.10-14

Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. — 143 p. — (Ancient commentators on Aristotle).This commentary by Philoponus, translated here by Sarah Broadie, discusses Aristotle’s treatment of time in his Physics Book 4, Chapters 10-14, and it creates a surprise. The other parts of Book 4 of Aristotle’s Physics concern place and vacuum, and the supposed impossibility of motion in a vacuum. On all these subjects Philoponus’ commentary offered innovative corrections of Aristotle which were a genuine contribution to science. These corrections were not all confined to the two digressive ‘Corollaries’ on place and vacuum, which interrupt the commentary. In those Corollaries Philoponus argued against Aristotle that a body’s place is not its immediate surroundings, much less the inner surface of its immediate surroundings, but is a three-dimensional extension that it occupies.