Mente e linguaggio animale in Claude Perrault (1613-1688)

This paper considers Claude Perrault’s views on animal language and cognition, one of the leader members of the early Parisian Académie royale des Sciences, where comparative anatomy emerged in the late seventeenth century. Perrault rejects both the Cartesian hypothesis of beasts as mere automata and of the Pineal Gland as siège de l’âme within the human brain. He conceives the animal soul as an immaterial and cognitive agent spread in the whole body, involved in the functional regulation of the all life processes. Animal thoughts, according to Perrault, must necessarily correspond to «animal voices». Nevertheless, he underlines that la parole depends far less on organs than on imagination, as shown by monkeys, unable to speak even though they own larynxes and other parts similar to human ones, and by birds like parrots, that can reproduce human speech.