ABSTRACT
In today’s textbooks, and for centuries before now, it has been commonplace to explain the workings of the mammalian eye as being similar to those of a non-biological camera. The same principles of optics are exemplified in each kind of device, and it has tempted some to say that the eye is a fleshy, gelatinous, photographic machine. So from our vantage point it is surprising that before Kepler’s discovery of the optical laws of image formation in the eye (living or dead) and camera obscura, this comparison was not readily available to early theorists of vision. Ibn al-Haytham (“Alhazen”) was the first to apply inferentialist notions to the theory of vision, prefiguring Helmholtz and also current computational accounts. However, he did not explain the workings of the eye in terms of optical laws that hold across living, non-living and artifactual structures. His understanding of the eye presupposed capacities for the reception of Aristotelian forms that could only occur in an animate structure (Meyering, 1989, pp. 45–48).
