Abstraction, Inference, Magnification

His work as a lens-grinder, for microscope and telescope lenses, seems to have no influence on Spinoza's Philosophical work.  In this respect, he is not alone.  But the absence of any Philosophical attention to these devices is especially conspicuous in an era when their influence is beginning to become patent, especially in the case of Copernicus, and when Epistemology has become the focus of Philosophy.  So, from neither Empiricists nor Rationalists has there been an adequate grounding of the phenomena that is perceivable to humans only via these devices.  Now, the source of that perceivability is Magnification.  But, the problem for the Empiricist is that Magnification does not reduce to Abstraction, whereas for the Rationalist, the problem is that Magnification does not reduce to Inference.  So, there seems to be lacking from both schools an adequate account of the type of Perception that has had a profound influence on human history the past 500 years.  But perhaps the strongest indication of this neglect is that from neither has there even been the rigorous Skepticism that each has exercised on some cognitive processes.