Indigenous Perspectivism and the Anti-Cartesian Animals of Lahontan and Leibniz
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Baron de Lahontan’s cosmopolitical representations of the republic of beavers recounted to him by Indigenous interlocutors constitute a knowing intervention within period debates about the intelligent sociality of animals. Emulating earlier thinkers of the animal such as Montaigne, Lahontan drew on the techniques of philosophical skepticism to communicate the teachings of his Abenaki, Anishinaabeg, Meskwaki and Wendat hosts to European readers. Ancient skeptic thinkers had mobilized the apparent sensorial intelligence of animals to undermine the anthropocentric bias of Stoic constructions of reason. Reviving and adapting such tactics to communicate his encounter with Indigenous knowledge to an early eighteenth-century readership, this article argues that Lahontan’s writings shaped the philosopher G.W. Leibniz’s choice of ecological and animal metaphors for the cosmic perceptual capacities of the “monad” proposed by his late writings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".