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ralowe's review
3.0
"specifically, animals are not as attached to the cosmic fire as man, to the *pМИr technikon*, to this artisan fire which cuts through all things, assembles them and gives them a meaning."ќ page 57. this passage had me diverted, perhaps wrongfully. if romanticism is primoridal re-emergence, the exhileration of teological assertion to the rescue. an animating principle that glides through all creation, creatures (animal, vegetable, mineral) in balanced proportions of thoroughgoing equanimity. seems i'm taken by stories prior to metaphysics, cloistered interpreting orders, murmuring numbly over moldy folios of annal-smirched vellum. pneuma. romance, alibi, escape hatch: a depersonalizing equivalence between all material energized by a single systematic narrative. psychological and exerting gently as simondon upon deleuze. actors need agents in hollywood. and wasn't i just reading about the stoics?
geoffreyjen's review
4.0
I picked up this book because it is one of the few books by Simondon that appears more accessible to the common reader. I intend to read his major works (the philosophy of individuation and of the technic) but viewed this as a kind of introduction to his thought and writing style. This book is also relatively short. I loved it, especially the second « lesson ». He is a subtle thinker, Simondon, and draws as much from the literary world as from the scientific. This book surveys the historical contributions to the opposing doctrines either that animals are distinct from humans or that they are the same. He delves as much into the pre-Socratic thinkers as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, Christian writers such as Saint Augustus or Saint Thomas, or Francis of Assissi, and Rennaissance and Enlightenment writers including Bruno, Montaigne and La Fontaine. This is not groundbreaking work like his other texts, but a fascinating treatise on the relation between animal and human.
sentient_meat's review
5.0
A really nice little introduction to the history of thinking w/r/t the distinctions between what gets called the animal and what calls itself human.