Parution : Sarah Cohen, “Picturing Animals in Early Modern Europe: Art and Soul”, Turnhout, Brepols, 2022
Do animals other than humans have consciousness? Do they knowingly feel and think, rather than simply respond to stimuli? Can they be said to have their own subjectivity? These questions, which are still debated today, arose forcefully in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when empirical approaches to defining and studying the natural world were coming to the fore. Philosophers, physicians and moralists debated the question of whether the immaterial “soul”–which in the early...