Spectacles Behind the Eyes

Abstract

It has been said of Sir Arthur Eddington, whose philosophy of science included many Kantian a priori considerations, that he had been very nearsighted all his life. At a late age he was fitted for spectacles and for the first time began really to take in the visual data. The implications of this uncharitable gossip are of course that the a priori elements of Eddington’s philosophy were primarily the result of myopia and only secondarily the result of methodological and scientific considerations.