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Francine Descartes. Francine Descartes (19 July 1635, Deventer – 7 September 1640, Amersfoort) was René Descartes 's daughter. Francine was the daughter of Helena Jans van der Strom, [1] a domestic servant of Thomas Sergeant — a bookshop owner and associate of Descartes at whose house in Amsterdam Descartes lodged on 15 October 1634.
May 30, 2018 · Given the technology available in the 17th century, it is highly unlikely that Robot Francine would have fooled anyone on the ship into thinking she was an actual human. But Descartes wouldn’t have needed Francine to be convincingly human.
Aug 19, 2016 · On what M. Baillet reported in la Vie de Descartes, that this philosopher had had a daughter named Francine in Holland, a very zealous Cartesian informed me that this story was a tall tale invented by Descartes’ enemies when he made a mechanical automaton with great industry in order to prove demonstratively that animals do not have souls and ...
- Minsoo Kang
- 2017
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Curated by Piper Marshall. The death of five-year old Francine Descartes in 1640 spurred her father, renowned philosopher, mathematician, and writer, René Descartes, to construct an animatronic effigy in her likeness.
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The French philosopher René Descartes was reputedly fond of automata: they inspired his view that living things were biological machines that function like clockwork. Less known is a strange story that began to circulate after the philosopher’s death in 1650. This centred on Descartes’s daughter Francine, who died of scarlet fever at the age of five.
According to the tale, a distraught Descartes had a clockwork Francine made: a walking, talking simulacrum. When Queen Christina invited the philosopher to Sweden in 1649, he sailed with the automaton concealed in a casket. Suspicious sailors forced the trunk open; when the mechanical child sat up to greet them, the horrified crew threw it overboard.
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The story is probably apocryphal. But it sums up the hopes and fears that have been associated with human-like machines for nearly three millennia. Those who build such devices do so in the hope that they will overcome natural limits — in Descartes’s case, death itself. But this very unnaturalness terrifies and repulses others. In our era of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), those polarized responses persist, with pundits and the public applauding or warning against each advance. Digging into the deep history of intelligent machines, both real and imagined, we see how these attitudes evolved: from fantasies of trusty mechanical helpers to fears that runaway advances in technology might lead to creatures that supersede humanity itself.
- Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal
- 2018
Jan 4, 2017 · Some Remarks on the Legacy of Madame Francine Descartes – First Lady and Historian of the Robocene – on the Occasion of 500 Years Since her Unlawful Watery Execution. By Dominic Pettman. It seems likely that the (highly suspect) story of Rene Descartes’s robot daughter has its origins in the middle third of the 18th century — post ...
Nov 12, 2006 · A bizarre myth began to circulate in the eighteenth century that Descartes was accompanied on his later travels by a life-size mechanical doll that he called Francine.
