Re: Avicenna's Doctrine of Cerebral Function
I have checked Lindberg's book and found the following. According to the index, the term `imagination' occurs only once, on p. 130; the quotation presented on that page is uninformative as far as the question under consideration is concerned. The common sense is discussed more often, but even those passages do not shed any light on the question under discussion. All in all, I have the impression that there is little reason to suppose that Avicenna thought that spatial relationships in the outside world are represented by similar spatial relationships within the cerebral ventricles. Avicenna did not think of retinal images, central retinotopic maps or anything of the sort. -- Dr Gert-Jan C. Lokhorst, Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands mailto:lokhorst@fwb.eur.nl http://www.eur.nl/fw/staff/lokhorst/