| Item Description: | Michael Laird, bookseller, description: Contemporary blue wrappers. Light spotting and age-toning, signs of use (not objectionable). Near contemporary inscription inside front cover detailing the difference between the first edition of 1684 and the present one; later pencil inscription "Duplum" (i.e. duplicate). Preserved in a blue cloth case. Second edition, greatly enlarged, and the first published with this title, being Darmanson’s development of the Cartesian view that animals are doomed to live only with an appetitive function, soulless, devoid of any capacity to experience pain, joy, or any emotions. Debates erupted in France and England, continuing well into the 18th-century, over what sorts of minds animals might have. In some ways, Darmanson's debate still goes on. Some opponents of Descartes' brutal mechanism argued that if Descartes was right, then humans were also potential automata. Darmanson, actually a Cartesian, originally published his much abbreviated argument as "La beste transformée" in 1684, and defended the beast-machine thesis. But there was a problem: he argued that if animals were "accorded the slightest degree of knowledge, joy, sadness, pleasure, pain, hate and love," then one had to assume that they had a soul like ours, "entirely separate from the body." But if that soul were immortal, then nothing would separate humans from beasts. Darmanson's attribution of animals' souls touches the core of debate on what it means to be human; the status of animals; and the responsibility of "humane" treatment of animals. Darmanson inspired many Early Modern philosophers, including Bayle (see his Dictionary, specifically the entry "Rorarius" on responsibility). Literature: Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (2007) pp. 194-195. |
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