Editing Simplicius of Cilicia (section)

=== Eternity of the world ===
Like Aristotle, Simplicius believed that the spatial extent of the universe was finite. He defended the Aristotelian doctrine of the [[eternity of the world|eternity and indestructibility of the cosmos]] against the position of [[John Philoponus]], who, as a Christian, accepted creation as the temporal beginning and a future end of the world and justified his view philosophically. One of Philoponus' arguments was that if the world has no beginning in time, an infinite number of days must already have passed. But if the number of days that make up the past is infinite, the present day could never have been reached, for that would have ended a succession of infinitely many days. On the other hand, Simplicius argued that the past years, since they belonged to the past, no longer existed; it is therefore not a matter of traversing a set of infinitely many real – not just potential – existing units, which Aristotle ruled out.{{sfn|Sorabji|1987|pp=164-178}}{{sfn|Bowen|2012|pp=11–14}}{{sfn|Hoffman|1987}}