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"In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler¿s Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler¿s radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler¿s ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions.
Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.
List of contents
"Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1The New Optical Narrative: Light, Camera Obscura, and the AstronomerÆs Wings
2ôSeeing with My Own Eyesö: Introducing the New Foundations of Scientific Knowledge
3The Content of KeplerÆs Visual Language: Abstraction, Representation, and Recognition
4ôNon tanquam Pictor, sed tanquam Mathematicusö: KeplerÆs Pictures and the Art of Painting
5Reading the Book of Nature: Allegories, Emblems, and Geometrical Diagrams
6Nothing and the Ends of Renaissance Science
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Raz Chen-Morris is Senior Lecturer in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Summary
Focusing on the astronomer Johannes Kepler's 1604 treatise on optics, explores Kepler's radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how he posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge in the early modern period.
