Rene Descartes’s robot daughter

January 25, 2017 1:30 PM

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.
posted by Rumple (3 comments total)

I hope this is not considered threadpooping. I just like the song.

The Philosopher's Song. Monty Python.
posted by Splunge at 6:06 PM on January 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

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]

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:

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]