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About the Speaker:       

Ofer Gal works on the coming to being of science as practice and culture during the 17th century and on the on ontological foundations of its success since. He has written on the history of celestial mechanics and optics, on realism and constructivism, on Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Kepler. He is the author of Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructures: Hooke, Newton and the Compounding of the Celestial Motions of the Planets and is currently working on two main projects, “Baroque Science” and “Empiricism and the Life Sciences in Early Modern Thought.”

 

 

 

Baroque Optics and the

Disappearance of the Observer

by

Prof. Ofer Gal

Head, History and Philosophy of Science
University of Sydney

Date:

3.30pm, Wednesday 16th September 2009

Location:

AS7Auditorium (AS7/01-02)
NUS Kent Ridge Campus

Abstract:

In the 17th century the human observer gradually disappears from optical treatises. This development is set in motion when Kepler, in an effort to defend and justify instrument-based astronomical observation, eschews visual rays and transforms optics into a strictly physico-mathematical theory of light. This turns the eye into a natural object, immersed in causal processes and deprives it of its privileged position as the telos of the optical progression. No longer subservient to reason, images are projections of light bouncing off objects, and vision is interiorized within the human mind. Ironically, the naturalization of vision estranges observer from image and prepares the ground for Descartes’ epistemological worry: that we may be completely wrong.

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