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Descartes’ Dioptrics
Citation:
McDonough, Jeffrey K. “Descartes’ Dioptrics.” In The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon, edited by Lawrence Nolan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Descartes’ work on optics spanned his entire career and represents a fascinating area of inquiry from both the perspectives of the history of science and his systematic natural philosophy. This entry offers a brief account of Descartes' seminal work in optics, the Dioptrique, often translated as the Optics or, more literally, as the Dioptrics.
