Ricerc@Sapienza

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.