Next
Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 30 Dec 2022

Taken: 30 Dec 2022

1 favorite     2 comments    16 visits

See also...

Keywords

Excerpt •
Excerpt & Image •
MAKING SPACE •
Author •
Jennifer Groh •

Authorizations, license

Visible by: Everyone
All rights reserved
16 visits

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.1
Early Greek scholars debated whether ision involves something entering the eye or leaving it. Plato thought the eyes sent forth some kind of rays to “feel” the world. Democritus and later Alhazen thought the opposite. Not until Kepler’s work in the first part of the seventeenth century was the optical basis of how the eye forms an image of the visual scene fully understood. This 1685 drawing illustrates the emerging concept of how this happens.

Erhard Bernstein has particularly liked this photo

Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The core of the debate between extramission and intromission would not be settled for more than a thousand years. As the Gerco-Roman Empire declined, the works of the Greek philosophers fell into obscurity. But the subsequent fise of the Islamic world reenergized each intellectual pursuits, and these works were rediscovered and translated into Arabic.

Initially, the outreach view held the sway. Muslim scholars such as Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi and Hunain ibn Ishaq subscribed to the extramission theory chiefly because the flows in the original formulation of intromission. The sticking point was Democritus’s conception of vision as involving a kind of material particle. If such particles were “felt” inside the eye and conveyed information on such features as the size of the object, wouldn’t these particles scale with the sisze of the object? How could really large objects, such as mountains, enter small eyes? And how could the same object enter the eyes of many observers at once? Such issues required explanation

Conceptually, these scholars were noticing a point that remains a focus of modern visual science: seeing can feel like it I something we do to the world, rather than something the world does to us. We don’t passively sit back and have the entire scene float into our eyes. Instead, we cast our gaze about, inspecting different objects as they capture our interest. As we move our eyes, our view of the scene changes. We see what we are looking at very clearly, and we are much less aware of the parts of the visual scene that we are not looking directly. These early scholars wondered why moving the eyes should affect what we see if vision is based on automatic emanations from the scene. Such observations seemed damning to the intromission theory and more consistent with the eyes as directing rays outward to feel the scene. ~ Page 10/11
17 months ago. Edited 17 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
MAKING SPACE
17 months ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.