L'uomo e la macchina animale. Claude Perrault e l'immagine del vivente nella storia naturale post-cartesiana

In January 1667 Claude Perrault submitted to the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris a Projet pour les expériences et observations anatomiques, a preamble to the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (1671-1676) and to the Essais de physique (1680-1688), aiming at a radical methodological renewal of phys- iology and comparative anatomy, based on a clear distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘hypotheses’. This paper considers the relationship in Perrault’s theory of living between analytical procedures in the history of animals and hypothetical-deductive method in psychophysiology, for a new, original view of the mind-body problem. By affirming a causal role of the soul (conceived as spread throughout the body) in the functional regulation of all life processes, Perrault frees himself from both the Cartesian hypothesis of living automata and of the Pineal Gland as siège de l’âme within the brain. This move is not the symptom of a bizarre and incoherent mixture of animism and mechanism. instead, it responds to one of the most debated issues in the science of life in the second half of the 17th century: the need to find a prin- ciple of integration and control of the organic processes, which cannot be revealed by simply breaking the body machine down into pieces.