
Published online:
21 September 2017
Published in print:
01 April 2016
Online ISBN:
9781474418614
Print ISBN:
9781474405317
Contents
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The validation of sensation The validation of sensation
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‘We learn to see just as we learn to speak and read’: Voltaire ‘We learn to see just as we learn to speak and read’: Voltaire
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Language, gesture, and the sensation: Condillac and Diderot Language, gesture, and the sensation: Condillac and Diderot
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A natural history of seeing: Buffon and tactile vision A natural history of seeing: Buffon and tactile vision
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Chapter
4 Voltaire, Buffon, and Blindness in France
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Pages
85–108
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Published:April 2016
Cite
Paterson, Mark, 'Voltaire, Buffon, and Blindness in France', Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (Edinburgh , 2016; online edn, Edinburgh Scholarship Online, 21 Sept. 2017), https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474405317.003.0005, accessed 6 May 2025.
Abstract
After Voltaire introduced an enthusiastic French readership to Molyneux’s question and Cheselden’s case study, there followed intense interest in blindness in La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot in his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (1749), and Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière (1749). To illustrate his ideas Buffon considers a hypothetical neonate who must correlate hands with eyes in order to see, the hand is “constantly measuring” so that distance and perspective can be learnt, implying that the blind still have spatial concepts.
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