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WiteloWitelo - also known as Erazmus Ciolek Witelo, Witelon, Vitellio, Vitello, Vitello Thuringopolonis, Erazm Ciołek, (born ca. 1230 probably in the village Borek in Lower Silesia - died after 1280, before 1314), was a Silesian and Polish friar, theologian and scientist: physicist, natural philosopher, mathematician, precursor of perception psychology science. His mother was from Polish knightly house, father was a settler from Thuringia. He called himself Latin Turingorum et Polonorum filius - son of Poland and Thuringia. He studied at the university in Padua around 1260 and then went to Viterbo. He became friends with William of Moerbeke, the translator of Aristotle. Witelo's major surviving work on optics, called Perspectiva was dedicated to William of Moerbeke. In Perspectiva, Witelo refers to other works that he had written. Most of these have not survived, but "De Natura Daemonum" and "De Primaria Causa Paenitentiae" have been recovered. Perspectiva was largely based on the work of the Arabic scholar Alhazen and was powerfully influential on later scientists, and in particular on Johannes Kepler. However, it also has much material on psychology, where it outlines doctrines that are close to our own notions of the association of ideas and the subconscious. It also has Platonic metaphysical discussions. He argues that there are intellectual and corporeal bodies, connected by causality (corresponding to the Idealist doctrine of the universal and the actual) emanating from God in the form of Divine Light. Light itself is, for Witelo, the first of all sensible entities, and his views on light are similar to those held by Roger Bacon. There is Vitello crater on Earth's Moon, named after Witelo.
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