Re: Avicenna's Doctrine of Cerebral Function -- Correction
Dear Christopher, I have answered your message before, but I did not look far enough. On the very last page of De Anima sive Sextus de Naturalibus (part 5 book 8), Avicenna makes a statement about the `formative faculty' (which is just another name for the `imaginatio') that seems to support your idea that visual images are stored spatially. They `mirror' the outside world. But someone might object, saying: ``How can the form of one mountain, let alone the form of the whole world, be imprinted on the tiny instrument which supports the formative faculty?'' To such a person we answer: the knowledge that bodies can be divided ad infinitum relieves us from this problem. Just as the world is imprinted on a small mirror and on the pupil because that in which it is imprinted is divided in accordance with its divisions---for the small object is divided in the same way as the larger one as far as its number and figure are concerned, even though the division of the one differs from that of the other in size---so it is with the disposition of the impression of the imaginable forms in their materials. In this way, the proportion between the things in which the imaginable form is imprinted, is---as far as the largeness of that in which it is imprinted and the smallness of that in which it is imprinted are concerned---the same as the proportion between two external objects as far as their largeness and smallness are concerned, taking into account the sameness of their distance. Hoping this helps, and with excuses for my previous misinformation, 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/