Ptolemy, Alhazen, and Kepler and the Problem of Optical Images (Q4946944)

This article is an excellent survey of the developments in theories of vision from Ptolemy to Kepler. It demonstrates very clearly how the conception of vision moved over time from an issue of ``seeing'', dependent on the perceiver who was supposed to send out particles-like matter from the eye in order to see the object, to the objective production of an image that was independent of the observer. One of the most interesting implications of this new shift in the early part of the seventeenth century is that it brought more confidence in the facts that were accumulated through optical instruments such as lenses and the like. Most notably, it allowed someone like Galileo to stress the importance, and, after all, the ``reality'' of the objects he was seeing through his telescope, and not to fall prey to the classical theories that explained all vision through instruments as deceptive. Even one's own eyes were not supposed to be uncontested conduits to truthful knowledge, because they could be deceived. The article also indudes an excellent assessment of the intermediate role of Ibn al-Haytham, usually cited as the father of modern optics, in which he is located as a follower and critic of Ptolemy's theories of vision, but at the same time a forerunner to Kepler in beginning to objectify the process of vision although not completely freeing it from the subjective process.