The medieval Latin version of Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitab al-Manazir, Alhacen’s De aspectibus provides a comprehensive treatment of vision from the physics of light to the psychology of misperception. Consisting of seven books, it is divided into three sections by topical focus, the first section consisting of books 1–3, which deal with visual perception in general. The primary intent of the analysis in this section is to show how the visual system works and how the working of that system is affected by ambient circumstances, such as too much light or too great a distance between eye and object.

Original publication: Smith, A. Mark. Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception: A Critical Edition, with English Translation and Commentary, of the First Three Books of Alhacen’s De aspectibus, the Medieval Latin Version of Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitab al-Manazir. Interpretatio Series B. 2020. URI: https://ircps.org/interpretatio-b/b003/. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Interpretatio under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.