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From its inception in Greek antiquity, the science of optics was aimed primarily at explaining sight and accounting for why things look as they do. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the analytic focus of optics had shifted to light: its fundamental properties and such physical behaviors as reflection, refraction, and diffraction. This dramatic shift—which A. Mark Smith characterizes as the “Keplerian turn”—lies at the heart of this fascinating and pioneering study.

Breaking from previous scholarship that sees Johannes Kepler as the culmination of a long-evolving optical tradition that traced back to Greek antiquity via the Muslim Middle Ages, Smith presents Kepler instead as marking a rupture with this tradition, arguing that his theory of retinal imaging, which was published in 1604, was instrumental in prompting the turn from sight to light. Kepler’s new theory of sight, Smith reveals, thus takes on true historical significance: by treating the eye as a mere light-focusing device rather than an image-producing instrument—as traditionally understood—Kepler’s account of retinal imaging helped spur the shift in analytic focus that eventually led to modern optics.

A sweeping survey, From Sight to Light is poised to become the standard reference for historians of optics as well as those interested more broadly in the history of science, the history of art, and cultural and intellectual history.

Professor Smith teaches a variety of courses in medieval history as well as the history of science from antiquity to the late Enlightenment. Broadly speaking, his interests lie in the field of intellectual history from the pre-Socratics to the Enlightenment, his scholarly focus being on the evolution of pre-Newtonian theories of visual perception.

He has published articles in The American Historical Review, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Archive for History of Exact Sciences,Revue d’histoire des sciences, and Isis. He has twice been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1979 and 1986), and has been awarded not only an individual research grant (1986) and a sponsored project-grant (1989) from the National Endowment for the Humanities but also four sponsored project-grants from the National Science Foundation (2008, 2005, 2000, and 1999). A Guggenheim fellow (2007), he is also a Lifetime Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a Membre Effectif of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences.

Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The Emergence of Optics as a Science: The Greek and Early Greco-Roman Background
1 Early Intimations
2 Physical and Psychological Theories of Vision
3 The Anatomical and Physiological Grounds of Vision
4 Theories of Color and Color Perception
5 The Euclidean Visual Ray Theory
6 Euclidean Catoptrics
7 Burning Mirrors and the Analysis of Focal Properties
8 Conclusion
Chapter 3 Ptolemy and the Flowering of Greek Optics
1 The Ptolemaic Account of Visual Perception
2 The Ptolemaic Account of Reflection
3 The Ptolemaic Account of Refraction
4 Atmospheric Refraction and the Moon Illusion
5 Conclusion
Chapter 4 Greco-Roman and Early Arabic Developments
1 Plotinus’s Theory of Visual Perception
2 The Later De anima Commentators
3 Saint Augustine’s Psychological Model: The Inward Ascent
4 The Arabic Transition: The De anima Tradition
5 The Arabic Transition: Geometrical Optics
6 Conclusion
Chapter 5 Alhacen and the Grand Synthesis
1 The Elements of Alhacen’s Analysis
2 Visual Discrimination, Perception, and Conception
3 Reflection and Its Visual Manifestations
4 Refraction and Its Visual Manifestations
5 Conclusion
Chapter 6 Developments in the Medieval Latin West
1 Background to the Translation Movement
2 The Translation Movement and the Inroads of Aristotelianism
3 The Scholastic Analysis of Perception and Cognition
4 Geometrical Optics and the Evolving Science of Perspectiva
5 Conclusion
Chapter 7 The Assimilation of Perspectivist Optics during the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance
1 Optics as a Quadrivial Pursuit in the Arts Curriculum
2 Theology and the Emergence of Optical Literacy
3 Optical Motifs in Literature
4 Renaissance Art, Naturalism, and Optics
5 Conclusion
Chapter 8 The Keplerian Turn and Its Technical Background
1 Technological, Social, and Cultural Changes: 1450–1600
2 Rethinking Concave Mirrors and Convex Lenses
3 Rethinking the Eye
4 Kepler’s Analysis of Retinal Imaging
5 The Analytic Turn
6 The Epistemological Turn
7 Conclusion
Chapter 9 The Seventeenth-Century Response
1 The Conceptual and Cultural Context for the Keplerian Turn
2 Extending Vision in Both Directions
3 New Theories of Light
4 Recasting Color
5 The Epistemological Consequences
6 Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
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