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‘All the World’s a Stage-Painting’: Scenery, Optics, and Greek Epistemology
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In the fourth century BCE, Anaxarchus and Monimus compared the world to stage-painting, to express scepticism about sense-perception and the worthlessness of human affairs, respectively. But the comparison traces back to Democritus’ discussion of Anaxagoras’ famous claim, a century earlier, that ‘appearances are a sight of things unseen’. According to Vitruvius, they were influenced by what Agatharchus had written about stage-painting, something that can be assessed properly only by considering the genre of technical treatises and the claims of those who were first to write on a subject. The comparison with phenomenal experience should ultimately be credited to Anaxagoras, though the points that he and Democritus make differ, owing to their different views of how the macroscopic world is related to underlying reality. These texts are thus not about the early history of perspectival painting, but stem from a fifth-century epistemological debate about what, if anything, sense-perception reveals about reality.
Title: ‘All the World’s a Stage-Painting’: Scenery, Optics, and Greek Epistemology
Description:
In the fourth century BCE, Anaxarchus and Monimus compared the world to stage-painting, to express scepticism about sense-perception and the worthlessness of human affairs, respectively.
But the comparison traces back to Democritus’ discussion of Anaxagoras’ famous claim, a century earlier, that ‘appearances are a sight of things unseen’.
According to Vitruvius, they were influenced by what Agatharchus had written about stage-painting, something that can be assessed properly only by considering the genre of technical treatises and the claims of those who were first to write on a subject.
The comparison with phenomenal experience should ultimately be credited to Anaxagoras, though the points that he and Democritus make differ, owing to their different views of how the macroscopic world is related to underlying reality.
These texts are thus not about the early history of perspectival painting, but stem from a fifth-century epistemological debate about what, if anything, sense-perception reveals about reality.
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