[citation needed] His by-name ὁ Φιλόπονος translates as "lover of toil", i.e. "diligent," referring to a miaphysite confraternity in Alexandria, the philoponoi, who were active in debating pagan (i.e. Neoplatonic) philosophers.
His posthumous condemnation limited the spread of his writing, but copies of his work, Contra Aristotelem, resurfaced in medieval Europe, through translations from Arabic of his quotes included in the work of Simplicius of Cilicia, which was debated in length by Muslim philosophers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali and later Averroes, influencing Bonaventure and Buridan in Christian Western Europe, but also Rabbanite Jews such as Maimonides and Gersonides, who also used his arguments against their Karaite rivals.
His work was largely debated in the Arabic scholarly tradition, where he is known as Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī (i.e. "John the Grammarian"), and his views against Aristotelian physics were defended by philosophers at the court of Fatimid Imam Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, particularly Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, who debated Avicenna on the topic, and Hamza ibn Ali.
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.
His intention was to provide the nascent Coptic church with a powerful set of tools for argument, with which Egyptian Monophysites could defeat their Chalcedonian opponents.Philoponus' early writings are based on lectures given by Ammonius, but gradually he established his own independent thinking in his commentaries and critiques of Aristotle's On the Soul and Physics.
As the discovery of the principle of inertia is the hallmark achievement of modern science as it emerges in the 16th to 17th centuries, Pierre Duhem argues that its invention would put Philoponus among the "great geniuses of Antiquity" and the "principal precursors to modern science", although he holds it more likely that Philoponus may have received the idea from an earlier, otherwise unrecorded Alexandrian school of mechanics.
He introduced a new period of scientific thought based heavily on three premises: (1) The universe is a product of one single God, (2) the heavens and the earth have the same physical properties, (3) and the stars are not divine.
[9] The style of his commentaries and his conclusions made Philoponus unpopular with his colleagues and fellow philosophers, and he appears to have ceased his study of philosophy around 530, devoting himself to theology instead.
Arbiter, John Philoponus' Christological "opus magnum" stands in the line with Cyril of Alexandria and Severus of Antioch.
[10] Philoponus asserted the understanding of Christ as divine and human, in opposition to Chalcedonian authors who strove to reach a middle ground.
After his death, John Philoponus was declared to have held heretical views of the Trinity and was made anathema at the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681.
Philoponus and his contemporaries, Simplicius of Cilicia and Strato developed the Aristotelian concept of space further, eventually influencing the Renaissance theory of perspective, particularly the one highlighted by Leon Battista Alberti, and other architectural masters.
Most of Philoponus’ early philosophical works strive to define the distinction between matter, extension, place, and various kinds of change.
One of interpreters of Philophonus’ work on the theory of mixture, De Haas, implies that "no element can possess a quality essential to it except to a superlative extent".
[10] John Philoponus wrote at least 40 works on a wide array of subjects including grammar, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and theology.