Description
An indispensible account of the transition from the Cartesian view of animals as mere biological machines to La Mettrie’s view that human beings are also just such machines. Rosenfield’s work is especially important for its consideration of a wide range of less well known French authors. The book also nicely illustrates the practical consequences that flowed from Descartes’s materialist account of animals. For example, she quotes Fontaine as reporting that followers of Descartes “administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they had felt pain. They said that the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring which had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling” (54). The work concludes with an invaluable discussion of the way this philosophical view influenced the French literary world in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Creator
Rosenfield, Leona
Publisher
New York: Oxford University Press, 1940.
Contributor
Grey, John
Language
English
Type
Book