Optics in the Middle Ages: Alhacen Edition, 4-5

SES 00-80445-A.Mark Smith(密苏里-哥伦比亚大学)-“阿尔哈森版，4-5”这个项目的目标是完成中世纪拉丁文版本阿尔哈森的Kitab al-Manazir(“光学专论”)第4-5册的评论版，带有英文翻译和学术注释，在七本书中对光和视力进行全面的处理。这篇论文是在11世纪早期用阿拉伯语写成的，大约两个世纪后被翻译成拉丁文，标题为de Aspectibus。在这种形式下，它迅速成为拉丁西方光学思想的典范来源，启发了一系列重要的衍生作品(最重要的是“透视主义”作者罗杰·培根、约翰·佩查姆和威特罗的那些作品)，也作为光学教学的主要文本，直到17世纪初。在中世纪和文艺复兴时期关于光、颜色和视觉表现的思想的形成中，阿尔哈辛的德阿斯佩克蒂布斯直接和间接地发挥了关键作用。不同于De Aspectibus的前三本书，这三本书一般都涉及视觉感知，而第四和第五本书专门致力于平面、凸面和凹面镜子中的反射和点图像的形成。阿尔哈森在第五本书中对图像位置的分析因其独创性和数学复杂性而引人注目，他不仅是研究反射的基准，也是中世纪后期数学研究的基准。拟议的批评版将使阿尔哈森的这一部分作品以最终形式不仅对科学史专家，而且对中世纪和文艺复兴时期的知识分子和文化史有更广泛兴趣的人开放。

SES 00-80445 - A. Mark Smith (University of Missouri - Columbia) - "Alhacen Edition, 4-5"The goal of this project is to complete a critical edition, with English translation and scholarly annotation, of books 4-5 of the medieval Latin version of Alhacen's Kitab al-Manazir ("Treatise on Optics"), a comprehensive treatment of light and sight in seven books. Composed in Arabic in the very early eleventh century, this treatise was rendered into Latin some two centuries later under the title De aspectibus. In that form it quickly became a canonical source for optical thought in the Latin West, inspiring a series of important derivative works (above all those of the "Perspectivist" authors Roger Bacon, John Pecham, and Witelo) and also serving as a primary text in the teaching of optics until the early seventeenth century. Both directly and indirectly, then, Alhacen's De aspectibus played a critical role in the formation of medieval and Renaissance ideas about light, color and visual representation. Unlike the first three books of the De aspectibus, which deal with visual perception in general, books 4 and 5 are devoted specifically to reflection and the formation of point-images in plane, convex and concave mirrors. Remarkable for both its originality and its mathematical sophistication, Alhacen's analysis of image-location in book 5 served as the benchmark for the study not only of reflection but also for mathematics in the later Middle Ages. The proposed critical edition will make this portion of Alhacen's work accessible in definitive form not only to specialists in the history of science but also to those with more general interests in medieval and Renaissance intellectual and cultural history.