ABSTRACT
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle uses the example of automata to illustrate the assertion that it is wondering (thaumazein) about the causes of things that prompts philosophy: ‘For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are, as they do about wondrous automata.’1 These marvellous selfmoving machines, products of art that imitate nature, provoke the desire to know that leads to philosophy.2 For automata’s apologists in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the authoritative example of Aristotle offered a compelling opportunity to associate self-moving machines with the positive qualities that were increasingly being attributed to both wonder and curiosity.3 In his compendious treatise on demonology, the IIII livres des spectres (1586), Pierre Le Loyer succinctly explains that because Aristotle reckoned automatonmaking an estimable occupation, ‘one may say that it is an excellent and divine art.’4 This status-fashioning for automata was necessary because, since antiquity, the reputation of self-moving machines had been in gradual
1 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1908), 983a12-15. 2 For distinctions between the relationship of wonder to ‘the desire to know’ and ‘curiosity’ in
antiquity and later periods, see L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 1998), 305.
