Nikephoros Choumnos

Nikephoros Choumnos, who lived from about 1253 to January 16, 1327, was a Byzantine scholar and official regarded as one of the most important figures in the flowering of arts and letters known as the Palaiologan Renaissance. He served for eleven years as chief minister under Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos, maintained an intense intellectual rivalry with the fellow scholar Theodore Metochites, and founded the monastery of Theotokos Gorgoepekoos in Constantinople. In philosophy he was an ardent and skillful defender of Aristotle, attacking Platonic theories of substance and form and composing refutations of Plotinus's theories of the soul in support of Christian teaching, and he wrote treatises on elemental theory, meteorology, cosmology and theology that one scholar credits with prefiguring later Western humanism.