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Arts Week: Thinking (about) automata in Descartes, Shaftesbury, and Diderot

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Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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This event is part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2019 - see the full programme.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, discussions of the soul in the secular sphere involved thinking about automata, and whether they might think. Breaking with Aristotle, Descartes uses the cultural phenomenon of automates (such as those he viewed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye) to suggest that, quite simply, all non-human animals are ‘bêtes-machines’. Shaftesbury is strongly opposed to this: refuting Descartes and Malebranche, he argues that all animals – including humans – should only be viewed as ‘clockwork’ when they are seized by fits. By contrast Diderot (an admirer of Vaucanson) argues, in support of materialism, that humans can usefully be imagined as animal-machines – or indeed as living statues. This tendency in Diderot can be traced in his early (1747) translation of Shaftesbury, in which the automaton, as ‘automate’, is introduced where it least belongs: in the English Earl’s thought experiment concerning a ‘solitary creature’.

James Fowler is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Kent. He has published extensively on eighteenth-century literature and thought, and has recently been working on (the) European Enlightenment, especially the ‘cross-Channel’ phenomenon linking French and British writers of the period 1660-1800. His publications include Richardson and the Philosophes (Legenda, 2014); The Libertine's Nemesis: The Prude in 'Clarissa' and the Roman libertin (Legenda, 2011); Voicing Desire: Family and Sexuality in Diderot's Narrative (Votaire Foundation, 2000), and the edited Candide and Other Works (Wordsworth Classics, 2014).

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