Kepler’s 1604 Optics (Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena) proposed among many other things a new way of locating the place of the image under reflection or refraction. He rejected the “perspectivist” method that had been used through antiquity and the Middle Ages, whereby the image was located on the perpendicular between the object and the mirror (the “cathetus”). Kepler faulted the method for requiring a metaphysical commitment to the action of final causes in optics: the notion that the image was at that place because it was best or appropriate for it to be there, and for no other discernible reason. Kepler’s new theory relied on binocular vision and depth perception to determine the location of the image. No final causes were required, and he showed that the image would in general not be found on the cathetus. According to modern scholarship, Kepler’s theory was part of his revolutionary transformation of the science of optics, and his abandonment of perspectivist optics; as a consequence, the theory of binocular vision is also thought to be original with him. This article demonstrates that the very same theory of binocular image location was set out by Giovanni Battista Benedetti some twenty years earlier, and his writings on this subject may have been Kepler’s unacknowledged source for his own theory. Furthermore, another mathematician, Simon Stevin, developed much the same theory at the same time as Kepler and, it seems, independently of either Benedetti or Kepler. The discovery of these other binocular theories, especially Benedetti’s, requires us to recognize that Kepler’s revolution (if it can be called that) emerged out of a wider dissatisfaction with the foundations of perspectivist optics, which other lesser-known opticians resolved in much the same way that Kepler did.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Saito, Fumikazu;
(2010)
Perception and Optics in the 16th Century: Some Features of Della Porta's Theory of Vision
(/isis/citation/CBB001021057/)
Book
Erin Webster;
(2020)
The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England.
(/isis/citation/CBB540485687/)
Book
Andersen, Kirsti;
(2007)
The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge
(/isis/citation/CBB000850432/)
Chapter
Dupré, Sven;
(2013)
The Return of the Species: Jesuit Responses to Kepler's New Theory of Images
(/isis/citation/CBB001201651/)
Book
Clark, Stuart;
(2007)
Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB000952788/)
Article
Shapiro, Alan E.;
(2008)
Images: Real and Virtual, Projected and Perceived, from Kepler to Dechales
(/isis/citation/CBB000850556/)
Article
Chen-Morris, Raz;
(2005)
Shadows of Instruction: Optics and Classical Authorities in Kepler's Somnium
(/isis/citation/CBB000601014/)
Chapter
Simon, Gérard;
(2001)
De Kepler à Descartes: le Renouvellement de la Problématique de la Vision
(/isis/citation/CBB000102759/)
Article
Malet, Antoni;
(1990)
Keplerian illusions: Geometrical pictures vs. optical images in Kepler's visual theory
(/isis/citation/CBB000032628/)
Book
Dominique Raynaud;
(2018)
Studies on Binocular Vision: Optics, Vision and Perspective from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB425442727/)
Book
Hendrix, John;
Carman, Charles H.;
(2010)
Renaissance Theories of Vision
(/isis/citation/CBB001220203/)
Chapter
Armogathe, Jean-Robert;
(2008)
“La nouvelle porte du ciel”. Sur la Dioptrique de Kepler
(/isis/citation/CBB000952192/)
Article
Dupré, Sven;
(2012)
Kepler's Optics without Hypotheses
(/isis/citation/CBB001211474/)
Article
Dupré, Sven;
Korey, Michael;
(2009)
Inside the Kunstkammer: The Circulation of Optical Knowledge and Instruments at the Dresden Court
(/isis/citation/CBB000932513/)
Article
Lehoux, Daryn;
(2007)
Observers, Objects, and the Embedded Eye; or, Seeing and Knowing in Ptolemy and Galen
(/isis/citation/CBB000773115/)
Book
Colette Dufossé;
(2021)
Les théories de la vision dans les mondes grec et latin du IVe au XIIe siècle. Entre permanence et renouveau
(/isis/citation/CBB374794157/)
Article
Jacobs, Gerald H.;
(2014)
The Discovery of Spectral Opponency in Visual Systems and Its Impact on Understanding the Neurobiology of Color Vision
(/isis/citation/CBB001420789/)
Thesis
Reilly, Brian Joseph;
(2008)
The Hidden Optics of Medieval French Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001560650/)
Book
Wade, Nicholas J.;
(2005)
Perception and Illusion: Historical Perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB000500286/)
Chapter
Petry, Yvonne;
(2013)
Vision, Medicine, and Magic: Bewitchment and Lovesickness in Jacques Grevin's Deux livres des venins (1568)
(/isis/citation/CBB001201650/)
Synthese
Journal of the History of the Neurosciences
Journal of the History of Ideas
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Be the first to comment!