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

SES 00-80445 - a . Mark Smith（密苏里大学哥伦比亚分校）-“alhazen Edition, 4-5”这个项目的目标是完成一个批判版，包括英语翻译和学术注释，中世纪拉丁语版alhazen的Kitab al-Manazir（“Treatise on Optics”），在七本书中对光和视觉进行了全面的处理。这篇论文于11世纪早期用阿拉伯语写成，大约两个世纪后被翻译成拉丁语，书名为De aspectibus。在这种形式下，它迅速成为拉丁西方光学思想的权威来源，激发了一系列重要的衍生作品（尤其是“透视主义”作者罗杰·培根、约翰·佩查姆和维特洛的作品），直到17世纪早期，它还一直是光学教学的主要文本。因此，无论是直接还是间接，阿尔哈森的《透视》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都发挥了关键作用。与《论面观》的前三本一般讨论视觉感知不同，第四册和第五册专门讨论反射和平面、凸面镜和凹面镜中点像的形成。在第五册中，阿尔哈森对图像定位的分析不仅是研究反思的基准，而且是中世纪后期数学研究的基准，其独创性和数学复杂性都令人瞩目。拟议的批判版将使阿尔哈森的这部分作品以明确的形式易于理解，不仅是科学史专家，而且对中世纪和文艺复兴时期的知识和文化史更感兴趣的人也能理解。

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.