Conclusions or From Antiquity to the Early Modern

Summary

The idea of the body as a machine constitutes one of the central analogies in early modern Western thought. From Descartes’ Treatise of Man (written in the 1630s) to the Iatromechanist School of medicine, and from La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1747) and de Vaucanson’s automata to science fiction’s fascination with cyborgs, robots and androids, mechanical models have been employed to reproduce and mimic one aspect or another of life itself. One of the aims of the present collection of essays has been to show that the conceptual origins of this early modern body–machine concept can be traced back to texts, scientific theories and ideas of classical antiquity. The technological artefact – be it a simple device or a more complex machine – in the texts and authors which we have been exploring does not stand in isolation from the flesh, bones, fluids and organs that make up the human body; on the contrary, they intersect with the latter in a number of significant ways.