Note: If television’s a babysitter, the internet’s a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.
Must look for Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. It would be great to be able to cite Dr. Funkenstein in a paper someday.
Martin Jay gestures at Funkenstein in Downcast Eyes as a footnote following this passage:
Zeno’s paradox which so perplexed Greek thought, shows how beholden it was to a detemporalized notion of reality (a central target, as we will see, of the French antiocularcentric discourse that began with Bergson’s critique of Zeno). Greek science, which was crowned by optics, was also incapable of dealing successfully with motion, in particular with the problem of acceleration.
Funkenstein evidently discusses the attempts to revise Greek thought to account for different sorts of causality—which is also central to the problem of defining a phenomena in an Aristotelian sense. According to Jay, the thesis that Greek thought was occularcentric is contested by William Ivins. For once, I think I agree with Ivins.
Ivins was the first curator of prints at the Library of Congress. He suggested in Prints and Visual Communication that the halftone screen provided images with a “syntax”— I disagree violently. However, according to Jay, in Art and Geometry Ivins claims that the Greeks had a tactile rather than ocular bias. I think this has more merit.
