On the Origin of John Philoponus’s De contingentia mundi

Abstract

The article re-examines the question of the origin of a text by the sixth-century Greek philosopher and Christian theologian John Philoponus, extant only as an epitome in Arabic translation, the so-called De contingentia mundi. It analyses the evidence for the existence of an anti-eternalist work by Philoponus in addition to those known in Greek and examines the correspondence between a portion of the Arabic epitome and a Greek fragment of Philoponus’s Against Aristotle that was preserved by Simplicius. Based on the vocabulary and phraseology of the epitome, the article proposes to attribute the Arabic epitome to the circle of the ninth-century Muslim philosopher al-Kindī. Finally, the article attempts to explain the evidence concerning the transmission of the epitome in milieus as diverse as that early Islamic philosophical circle and the later Christian Arabic tradition, which preserved it.