Tempier’s pronouncements were not the final blow to Aristotelian philosophy, but they certainly signaled that the foundations were crumbling. The church would cling to Aristotle for a few more centuries, but the fall of Aristotle and the rise of the void and the infinite were clearly beginning. It was a propitious time for zero to arrive in the West. In the mid-twelfth century the first adaptations of al-Khowarizmi’s Al-jabr were working their way through Spain, England, and the rest of Europe. Zero was on the way, and just as the church was breaking the shackles of Aristotelianism, it
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