Descartes, La Mettrie, Language, And Machines
Keith Gunderson · Philosophy · 1964
IN L'Homme machine La Mettrie at one point discusses the possibility of teaching an ape to speak, and later he suggests that just as the inventor Vaucanson had made a mechanical flute player and a mechanical duck, it might be possible some day for ‘another Prometheus’ to make a mechanical man which could talk.