By John Philoponus
In the most unique books of past due antiquity, Philoponus argues for the Christian view that topic will be created by means of God out of not anything. It wishes no previous subject for its production. whilst, Philoponus transforms Aristotle's belief of leading topic as an incorporeal 'something - i do know now not what' that serves because the final topic for receiving extension and characteristics. to the contrary, says Philoponus, the final word topic is extension. it really is three-d extension with its targeted dimensions and any traits unspecified. in addition, such extension is the defining attribute of physique. for this reason, to date from being incorporeal, it truly is physique, and in addition to being top topic, it's shape - the shape that constitutes physique. This makes use of, yet solely disrupts, Aristotle's conceptual equipment. ultimately, in Aristotle's scheme of different types, this extension isn't really to be labeled below the second one classification of volume, yet lower than the 1st type of substance as a considerable quantity.
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Sample text
If, on the other hand, it too is generated, it in turn will have come to be out of something else, and so on ad infinitum. From this they conclude that if [such a regress] is impossible, it is impossible for the cosmos to be generated; and so it will be ungenerated. These, then, are the arguments by means of which one might support the view that everything that comes to be comes to be from something [already] in being and that nothing comes to be from absolute non-being and that the cosmos is therefore ungenerated; the things that one might say in response to them follow.
And if it is impossible for the whiteness which has perished to have come [back] into being still numerically the same, then the individual whiteness which perished is not still present numerically the same in the underlying body even potentially – not at any rate if that which is potentially something can also come to be in actuality. So if it is impossible for the whiteness which has perished to come [back] into being still numerically the same, then it will not be in the underlying body even potentially.
And so, even though the underlying [body] changes from the potentiality to the actuality, and back from the actuality to the potentiality, the enmattered forms themselves pass over for their part into absolute non-being when they perish – and are also on that account brought into being out of absolute non-being by the one who makes them. One should also look at [the matter] this way. If there were a white body, and if it were later, when the whiteness in it perished, to become potentially white, and then the same [body] were to become actually white again, it would, one supposes, be necessary that the whiteness which came to be in it later should not be numerically166 the same as the whiteness which had previously come to be in the same [body], even though it is specifically167 the same – in the way that Socrates is specifically the same as Plato though not numerically the same, and the movement of a sphere, which starts and ends at the same point, is specifically the same today, say, and yesterday, but not numerically the same.