Chapter ID: CBB081934406

Vision, Color, and Method in Newton’s Opticks (2014)

unapi

In this essay I argue for the centrality of Newton’s theory of vision to his account of light and color. Relying on psycho-physical experiments, anatomical observations, and physical hypotheses, Newton, quite early in his career, elaborated an original, although largely hypothetical, theory of vision to which he remained faithful throughout his life. The main assumptions of this theory, I urge, play an important (although almost entirely tacit) role in the demonstration of one of the most famous theses of the Opticks: the thesis that spectral colors are “innately” present in white solar light. The theory of vision is especially crucial to understanding the second ‘synthetic’ part of the demonstration, which deals with experiments showing how white light can be artificially produced out of prismatic colors. This synthesis is not, as often conceived, a mere reversal of the analysis, brought in for pedagogical reasons, but, as I argue, an integral part of the Newtonian demonstration—and this makes its dependency on the theory of vision all the more striking. In the first two sections of this essay, I propose a reconstruction of the argument developed in Book I of the Opticks, and I show why and where a theory of vision is needed. In the third section, I go back to Newton’s early researches into the psycho-physiology of vision, in order to give a fuller presentation of Newton’s actual theory of vision and to show that this theory, even though it was developed independently of the prismatic experiments, was, in all its component parts, precisely the one needed for the demonstration of color innateness.

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Book Zvi Biener (2014) Newton and Empiricism. unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB081934406/

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Authors & Contributors
Guicciardini, Niccolò
Dijksterhuis, Fokko Jan
Buchwald, Jed Z.
Currie, Adrian
Yoram Hazony
Kirsten Walsh
Concepts
Optics
Color
Physics
Vision
Experiments and experimentation
Teaching; pedagogy
Time Periods
17th century
18th century
19th century
Renaissance
Medieval
20th century
Places
Great Britain
Padua (Italy)
England
Netherlands
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