ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines how Lenn Goodman argues, however, that there is no indication that Molyneux read Ibn Tufayl. “Ibn Ṭufayl stood in the background here, of course, but less for saying that the blind cannot know colors and more for what he represented a life of open inquiry”. It suggests Irish intellectuals during Molyneux’s time frequently referred to humanity’s lack of knowledge of God to be analogous to the lack of knowledge of light and color in people born blind. The book explores what Nicholas Wade describes Dioptrica Nova as an assortment of proposed solutions to problems in optics and vision, including Molyneux’s conjecture, later borrowed by Helmholtz without attribution, that touch explains why our visual experience is not inverted though we see with an inverted retinal image.
