Rene Descartes’s robot daughter
January 25, 2017 1:30 PM Subscribe
Together, as fellow members of the guild of formerly pneumatic entities — the Roombas, Hoovers, scubas, flus, and turbo-charged loofahs — we honor this important legacy, in memoriam.A biography of Francine Descartes by Dominic Pettman, third in the Conjectures series in the Public Domain Review.
This is very weird to see this posted. I've been obsessed with this story for a decade & wrote poetry/music for it. Interesting to see it come to light.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 8:43 PM on January 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 8:43 PM on January 25, 2017 [1 favorite]
Having come across this story in a couple of different contexts I became curious about its origins, and, after some convoluted googlings, found the following:
posted by misteraitch at 12:58 AM on January 26, 2017 [2 favorites]
The story originates from a book of literary and pholosophical anecdotes, Mélanges d‘Histoire et de Litterature (1700) by the Carthusian moraliste Bonaventure d’Argonne, who wrote under the pseudonym Vigneul-Marville. In it, he claims to have been informed by a “very zealous” Cartesian that the story in Adrien Baillet’s first biography of Descartes (1691) that he fathered an illegitimate daughter named Francine was a lie concocted by his enemies and that the name belonged to an automaton he created and subsequently lost at sea…
—Minsoo Kang: Sublime dreams of living machines: the automaton in the European imagination.An interesting novel loosely inspired by the same story is Nike Sulway’s Rupetta.
posted by misteraitch at 12:58 AM on January 26, 2017 [2 favorites]
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The Philosopher's Song. Monty Python.
posted by Splunge at 6:06 PM on January 25, 2017 [1 favorite]