A philosophical perspective on Alhazen's optics

Arabic Sciences and Philosophy

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 189-218

  El Bizri, Nader ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949842571     PISSN: 09574239     EISSN: 14740524     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0957423905000172     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, Books I-III, On Direct Vision, trans. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 2 vols. (London, 1989);
2. Ibn al-Haytham, Kitāb al-Manāz{dot below}ir, ed. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, Books I-III (Kuwait, 1983) and Books IV-V (Kuwait, 2002).
3. See also: Opticae thesaurus Alhazeni, ed. Friedrich Risner (Basel, 1572; repr. New York, 1972)
4. and the Latin critical edition of De aspectibus with English translation in: Albert Mark Smith, Alhacen's Theory of Visual Perception (Philadelphia, 2001). We shall hereafter refer to Alhazen's Optics as Kitāb al-Manāz{dot below}ir in the body of the text, followed by the book, chapter, and section numbers, which correspond to Sabra's Arabic critical edition and annotated English translation.
5. See: David C. Lindberg, 'Lines of influence in the 13th cent. Optics: Bacon, Witelo, and Pecham', Speculum, 46 (1971): 66-83;
6. David C. Lindberg, 'La réception occidentale de l'optique arabe', in Roshdi Rashed and Régis Morelon (eds.), Histoire des sciences arabes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1997), vol. II: Mathématiques et physique, pp. 355-68;
7. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, 1990);
8. Martin Kemp, Geometrical Perspective from Brunelleschi to Desargues (Oxford, 1984);
9. Martin Kemp, 'Science, non-science, and nonsense: Brunelleschi's perspective', Art History 1, n. 2 (1978): 134-61.
10. A. I. Sabra reminds us in his 'Preface' (The Optics, p. xi) that: Alhazen's Optics 'belongs as much to the history of Latin medieval and early modern science as it does to the history of science in medieval Islam'. Moreover, given that its reception reached J. Kepler, R. Descartes and C. Huygens, one is prompted to also investigate the prolongations of its philosophical imports, particularly from the standpoint of phenomenological research, which mediates its inquiries via thematic engagements with the history of philosophy and science.
11. Regarding reflections on Alhazen's theory of visual perception, I refer the reader to: Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 'Sensation and inference in Alhazen's theory of visual perception', in Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (eds.), Studies in Perception: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and Science (Columbus, 1978), pp. 160-85;
12. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 'Form in Ibn al-Haytham's theory of vision', Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, vol. 5 (1989): 115-40;
13. Mustafa Nazif, al-H{dot below}asan Ibn al-Haytham, buhūthuhu wa-kushūfuhu al-bas{dot below}ariyya, 2 vols. (Cairo, 1942-3), vol. I;
14. Rashed, 'L'optique géométrique', in Histoire des sciences arabes, vol. II;
15. Roshdi Rashed, 'Optique géomeacute;trique et doctrine optique chez Ibn al-Haytham', in Optique et mathématiques: Recherches sur l'histoire de la pensée scientifique en arabe (Aldershot, 1992), chapter II
16. and in Archive for History of Exact Sciences, vol. 6 (1970): 271-98;
17. Graziella Federici Vescovini, Studi sulla prospettiva medievale (Turin, 1965).
18. See: Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 'Ibn al-Haytham's criticisms of Ptolemy's Opics', Journal of the History of Philosophy, 4 (1966): 145-9, p. 146;
19. Albert Lejeune, Euclide et Ptolémée, deux stades de l'optique géométrique grecque (Leuven, 1948), p. 12.
20. For an insight into Alhazen's approach to binocular vision, see also: Dominique Raynaud, 'Ibn al-Haytham sur la vision binoculaire, un précurseur de l'optique physiologique', Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 13 (2003): 79-99.
21. The conditions for seeing objects that fall outside the cone of vision, yet that are sensed in lateral sight by way of refraction, are discussed in: Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 'Ibn al-Haytham's revolutionary project in optics: The achievement and the obstacle', in Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra (eds.), The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), pp. 85-119.
22. Deviating from the Latin perceptio (or percipere), the German Wahrnehmung, with its embedded reference to Wahrheit, renders perception in Kantian terms as a representation that is accompanied by consciousness. Regarding the implications of this etymology, see: Jean-Pierre Cléro, Théorie de la perception, de l'espace à l'émotion (Paris, 2000), pp. 16-17.
23. We are principally dealing here with the conditions of veridical perception; see also: Sabra, 'Sensation and inference', p. 182, n. 27.
24. See: Pierre Kaufmann, L'expérience émotionelle de l'espace (Paris, 1967), p. 319;
25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques (Paris, 1996), p. 48;
26. Cléro, Théorie de la perception, pp. 41-4. It is similar factors in pictorial representation that generated the experimental forms of Cubism.
27. In phenomenological terms, a noetic activity (namely, the "intentional activity of consciousness") relates to the noematic correlate of an object (namely, the "objectively intended object of cognition" or the "intentional correlate"). Given that every object is an intentional object, noesis designates the intentional act while noema refers to the intentional correlate or objectively intended object of this intentional act; namely, the intentional contents of the noetic acts. Thus we intend objects through the noemata. In view of elucidating this noetic-noematic structure, see: Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, in Husserliana XVIII, ed. Elmar Holenstein (The Hague, 1975);
28. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, in Husserliana XIX, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague, 1984);
29. Edmund Husserl, Ding und Raum, in Husserliana XVI, ed. Ulrich Claesges (The Hague, 1973), sections 16, 24;
30. Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, Eduard Marbach (eds.), An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston, 1995), pp. 116-17;
31. Kevin Mulligan, 'Perception', in Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 192-4;
32. same volume: David W. Smith, 'Mind and body', pp. 323-93.
33. e siècle, volume IV: Ibn al-Haytham, méthodes géomé triques, transformations ponctuelles et philosophie des mathématiques (London, 2002), pp. 8-10.
34. The role of time in visual perception is elucidated in: Kitāb al-Manāz{dot below}ir, II-3 [57-66].
35. The rise of a feeling of the sublime in the overstraining of the capacities of the imagination was intricately elucidated in Book II on the 'Analytic of the Sublime' in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1911).
36. Regarding this matter, see: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénomé nologie de la perception (Paris, 1945), pp. 346-7.
37. See: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Gesamtausgabe 2 (Tübingen, 1953), section 7. In other terms, the phenomenon becomes indicative of itself, whereby appearance does not conceal the essence of a thing as much as reveal it; if not even letting essence become self-shown as an apparition.
38. Refer also to: Jean-Paul Sartre, L'être et le néant, essai d'ontologie phénoménologique (Paris, 1943), pp. 11-16.
39. This geometrical demonstration is advanced in reference to Alhazen's endeavour Fī al-misāh{dot below}a in: Roshdi Rashed, 'Les mathématiques de la terre', in Giancarlo Marchetti, Orsola Rignani and Valeria Sorge (eds.), Ratio et superstitio, Essays in Honor of Graziella Federici Vescovini, Textes et études du Moyen Âge, 24 (Louvain-la-Neuve, 2003), pp. 285-318, pp. 286-90.
40. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 'Psychology versus mathematics: Ptolemy and Alhazen on the moon illusion', in Edward Grant and John E. Murdoch (eds.), Mathematics and its Application to Science and Natural Philosophy in the Middle, Essays in Honor of Marshall Clagett (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 217-48;
41. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, Optics, Astronomy and Logic (Aldershot, 1994), chapter IX.
42. Sabra, 'Psychology versus mathematics', section II.
43. An Arabic critical edition and annotated French translation of this epistle is published in: Rashed, Les mathématiques infinité simales, IV, pp. 666-85.
44. (Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery [Paris, 1965], vol. IV, p. 36).
45. Philoponus attacked Aristotle's definition of topos, and argued that place is an immobile three-dimensional extension that is conceivable as void, without entailing that it is ever empty in fact. See: John Philoponus, Corollaries on Place and Void, trans. David Furley (London, 1991);
46. Ioannis Philoponi in Aristotelis Physicorum libros quinque posteriores commentaria, ed. Hieronymus Vitelli, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca XVII (Berlin, 1888);
47. Aristotle, Physics, ed. William David Ross (Oxford, 1950).
48. See: Khalid Bouzoubaâ Fennane, 'Réflexions sur le principe de continuité à partir du commentaire d'Ibn al-Haytham sur la proposition I-7 des Éléments d'Euclide', Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 13 (2003): 101-36, p. 122.
49. See also: Alhazen, Dubitationes in Ptolemaeum (al-Shukūk 'alā Batlamyūs), ed. A. Sabra and N. Shehaby (Cairo, 1971);
50. Alhazen, Dubitationes in Ptolemaeum, trans. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 4 (1966): 145-59.
51. See also: The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, eds. Arthur A. Luce and Thomas E. Jessop, 9 vols. (Edinburgh, 1948-1957);
52. George Berkeley, Berkeley's Philosophical Writings, ed. David M. Armstrong (New York, 1965).
53. See Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, pp. 294-309.
54. Also consult: Joseph J. Kockelmans, 'Merleau-Ponty on space perception and space', in Joseph J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel (eds.), Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences (Evanston, 1970), pp. 281-96.
55. I have considered this ontological question elsewhere; see: Nader El-Bizri, 'Qui êtes-vous XΩPA: On receiving Plato's Timaeus', Existentia Meletai-Sophias, XI (2001): 473-90;
56. Nader El-Bizri, 'A phenomenological approach to the ontological question of space', Existentia Meletai-Sophias, XII (2002): 345-64;
57. Nader El-Bizri, 'ON KAI XΩPA: Situating Heidegger between the Sophist and the Timaeus', Studia Phaenomenologica IV (2004): 73-98;
58. Nader El-Bizri, 'Ontopoièsis and the interpretation of Plato's Kh.̂ra', Analecta Husserliana, LXXXIII (2004): 25-45.
59. See also: El-Bizri, 'La perception de la profondeur: Alhazen, Berkeley et Merleau-Ponty'; El-Bizri, 'La phénoménologie et l'optique géométrique'.
60. Berkeley, Theory of Vision, section 2.
61. Regarding representative Latin texts within the perspectivae tradition in mediaeval science, see: Roger Bacon, The Opus Majus, trans. Robert Belle Burke (New York, 1962);
62. Roger Bacon, Opus maius, ed. John Henry Bridges, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1900);
63. Roger Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, ed. David C. Lindberg (Oxford, 1983);
64. Witelo, Witelonis perspectiva liber quintus, trans. by Albert Mark Smith (Wisconsin-Madison, 1976);
65. John Pecham, Perspectiva communis, ed. and trans. David C. Lindberg (Wisconsin-Madison, 1970);
66. John Pecham, Tractatus De Perspectiva, ed. David C. Lindberg (New York, 1972).
67. have also addressed this matter elsewhere in detail, see: El-Bizri, 'A phenomenological approach to the ontological question of space'.
68. Berkeley, Dialogues, I, pp. 164-5.
69. To better grasp Berkeley's hypothesis, we are led back to his rejection of John Locke's Representative Theory, which was advanced in the latter's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ca. 1690 C.E.).
70. One could point in this context to the reflective structure of the verbum, which, like light, makes things visible, including itself (expressio exprimentis et expressi); see: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London, 1989), p. 503.
71. We perhaps do not need to be reminded herein that Alhazen's focus was on light as d{dot below}aw', whose nature and essence are physical, while its comportment is mathematically determinable. This state of affairs accentuates Alhazen's intellectual integrity, particularly when his Optics was composed in an intellectual and geo-cultural environment (Cairo, ca. post-1028 C.E.) dominated by fāt{dot below}imī doctrines that were imbued with metaphorical and onto-theological speculations about the existential power of light (principally as al-nūr). In classical forms, the distinction between lux and lumen, may also be found in the double sense of light which carries the names: φπ{variant}ς and φα. For an insight into Alhazen's discussion of light, its form and essence, in a tract that is other than his Optics, I refer the reader to: Roshdi Rashed, 'Le "Discours de la lumière" d'Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen). Traduction française critique', Revue d'histoire des sciences, 21 (1968): 197-224;
72. Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. David Ross (Oxford, 1924).
73. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, section 36.
74. See: Gerald A. Press, 'Knowledge as vision in Plato's Dialogues', The Journal of Neoplatonic Studies, 3 (1995): 61-89.
75. See: Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfüllingen, 1985), p. 48;
76. William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of History (Albany, 1999), p. 174. The insight pointed at in this context may itself accord with the interrelations of the family of Arabic terms: naz{dot below}ar, naz{dot below}ariyya, manāz{dot below}ir, and manz{dot below}ūr, which respectively designate: seeing, theory, optics, perspective or the seen.
77. McNeill, The Glance of the Eye, pp. x-xi.
78. For instance, in affinity with a humanist spirit, Alberti adopted a "Christianized version" of Protagoras' maxim: Hominem [inquiens] modum et mensuram rerum omnium esse, namely: παντων μετρον 'ανθρωπο ς (That the human being is the scale and measure of all things); Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura et De Statua, ed. with trans. by Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), I-18.
79. See: Alberti, De Pictura et De Statua; Lorenzo Ghiberti, Commentarii (Napoli, 1947);
80. Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, ed. Giusta Nicco-Fasola (Firenze, 1989).
81. As Jay attempted to show, a "denigration of vision" has accompanied the radically critical stances taken with regard to space and the privileging of temporal and chronological analyses over spatial ones. He furthermore takes this state of affairs to be the result of a modern French intellectual endeavour (from the times of H. Bergson to those of J. Derrida) to defy the epistemological bearings of the Enlightenment and its stress on rationality. Vision, the "noblest of the senses", is challenged in its capacity to offer a reliable access to reality, and space is seen as being not only inert but is also grasped as an accommodating phenomenon that facilitates the exercising of oppressive power and violence. See: Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993);
82. John Rajchman, 'Foucault's art of seeing', October, 44 (1988): 89-117, pp. 90, 95.
83. Architectural spaces are essentially formed by human situations that are corporeally structured prior to being determined geometrically. Moreover, most of our dealings with objects are conducted from an exteriority; for, in order to be able to experience the interiority of things we must go beyond their surfaces, to reveal the depth they enclose as well as open them up. Architectural spaces invert this relation with objective surfaces in letting us dwell within an interiority that is not the mere residual hollowness surrounded by an exterior containing enveloper, rather as a place that is corporeally inhabited. The dilemma of modernity, in aspiring to reconcile techno-scientific achievements with the situational emplacement of the human condition in the natural world, is claimed to potentially find its inspiration in the latent capacity of architecture to gather multi-layered levels of reality, and to relate abstract conceptual structures to the concreteness of everydayness. This state of affairs is seen as being of focal significance to the restoration of the topological and corporeal grounds of culture that may shelter a sense of humanism in the age of modern technology. Regarding the thrust of this line in interpretation, I refer the reader to: Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
84. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 'The physical and the mathematical in Ibn al-Haytham's theory of light and vision', in Commemoration Volume of Bīrūnī International Congress in Tehran (Tehran, 1976), pp. 1-20;
85. e Congrès International d'Histoire des Sciences, Tome III A (Paris, 1971), pp. 133-6;
86. Sabra, Optics, Astronomy and Logic, chapter IV;
87. Saleh Beshara Omar, Ibn al-Haytham's Optics: A Study of the Origins of Experimental Science (Minneapolis, 1977).