The late 19th-century Ignorabimus controversy over the limits of scientific knowledge has often been characterized as proclaiming the end of intellectual progress, and by implication, as plunging Germany into a crisis of pessimism from which Liberalism never recovered. My research supports the opposite interpretation. The initiator of the Ignorabimus controversy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, was a physiologist who worked his whole life against the forces of obscurantism, whether they came from the Catholic and Conservative Right or the scientistic and millenarian Left. (...) Du Bois-Reymond’s doubt that scientists would ever elucidate consciousness must therefore be seen as an endorsement, and not a rejection, of his faith in reason. (shrink)

Psychology has been the significant discipline since the time of antiquity which becomes more consolidated during the medieval age of Islam. It had a strong foundation in the professional writings of polymaths from the Islamic Middle Ages that were eventually transmitted to the West. However, the unique psychological contributions of these medieval polymaths remained largely unexplored. Despite the growing interest in their work, which is partly due to Islamic psychology, only a handful of them have been investigated for their unique (...) psychological contributions, and a complete examination of psychological work has not been done, separately from an Islamic perspective. The majority of them have only been examined in terms of their medical value, neglecting psychological issues in their all-encompassing approaches to care. Therefore, it was quintessential to extensively explore all those scholars who contributed to the various fields of psychology and to fill a gap of information that has been left by the previous researchers. (shrink)

The undoubted truth is that there exist for the planetary motions true and constant configurations from which no impossibilities or contradictions follow; they are not the same as the configurations asserted by Ptolemy; and Ptolemy neither grasped them nor did his understanding get to imagine what they truly are.

Dynamic surface completion is a phenomenon of visual filling-in where a colored pattern perceptually spreads onto an area confined by virtual contours in a multi-aperture motion display. The spreading effect is qualitatively similar to static texture spreading but widely surpasses it in strength, making it particularly suited for quantitative studies of visual interpolation processes. I carried out six experiments to establish with objective tasks that homogeneous color, as well as non-uniform texture spreading is a genuine representation of surface qualities and (...) thus goes beyond mere contour interpolation. The experiments also serve to relate the phenomena to ongoing discussions about potentially responsible mechanisms for spatiotemporal integration: With a phenomenological method, I examined to what extent simple sensory persistence might be causally involved in the effect under consideration. The findings are partially consistent with the idea of sensory persistence, and indicate that information fragments are integrated over a time window of about 100 to 150 ms to form a complete surface representation. (shrink)

ArgumentA Catoptrica attributed to Euclid appears in manuscripts amongst treatises dealing with elementary astronomy. Despite this textual background, the treatise has always been read literally as a theory of mirrors, and its astronomical significance has gone unnoticed. However, optics, catoptrics, and astronomy appear strongly intermingled in sources such as, amongst others, Geminus, Theon of Smyrna, Plutarch and Cleomedes. If one compares the optical reasoning put forward in these sources to account for the formation of moonlight with arguments of Catoptrica, one (...) is able to shed new light on several principles and propositions of Catoptrica, some of which had been deemed corrupt, meaningless, and obscure. Moreover, the present analysis offers a glimpse at the context of a specific stage in the evolution of ancient catoptrics: Whether literally or by analogy, several of its results appear to have been set against a wider astronomical background, which explains the inclusion of Catoptrica in the group of texts loosely defined as “little astronomy.”. (shrink)