| Item Description: | Michael Laird, bookseller, description: Bound in contemporary French calf (joints and extremities rubbed, hinges cracked and quite tender). Blind stamps on first and last leaves from the now-defunct Theological Institute of Connecticut. Preserved in a brown cloth protective case. Very early analysis (pro and con) of Descartes' animal-machine. Descartes and his followers argued that animals are incapable of reason, thought, and self-consciousness. Although technically "alive" and could feel pain, animals were more like automata and therefore did not deserve moral consideration — thereby justifying vivisection and other brutal treatment. Of course animals were, and are, widely used in pursuit of answers to anatomical, physiological, and embryological questions. But vivisection itself was carried out by such ancient luminaries as Galen, and there was a resurgence of the practice in the Early Modern era. Descartes himself practiced and advocated vivisection, and wrote that the mechanical understanding of animals absolved people of any guilt for killing and/or eating animals. Jacques Rohault (1618-1672) was at the time the leading scholar of Descartes's natural philosophy. In the present work (first printed in 1671), Rohault deals with a number of controversial topics, notably Descartes' ideas on the animal soul. Rohault devoted around a quarter of his "Entretiens sur la philosophie" to the issue of animal automatism (approximately fifty pages in total). In the first half of his treatise he considers philosophical arguments for and against the hypothesis that "beasts are nothing but pure machines." Once the probability of the hypothesis is establishhcd, Rohault looks to sharpen it up: 'Does a pure machine have a soul? If so, what kind of soul does it have?' Rohault outlines three kinds of soul: rational, sensitivc, and vegetativce. He thinks it is 'indubitable' that they have the second kind, which he takes to be a corporeal principle of sensation and movement. That Rohault grants animals a soul is of the great significance in the history of animal rights. This 1673 edition is distinguished by the inclusion of a 54-page "Discours sur les sujets traites dans les Entretiens" which is not present in the first edition. |
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