a book on automata

[Matthew Cissell]

Since Dave posted the CESR study link the other day and some other folks are recommending books, I thought I might throw one out there.

TP's use of the automaton from V. onward has interested me for some time, and thus I came across this book. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines by Minsoo Kang. (TP gets mentioned but only in regard to his use of the Duck.) This fine example of intellectual history was published in 2011 by Harvard UP and runs to just over 300 pages. Kang tries to demonstrate the "automaton's value as a conceptual tool with which Western culture has meditated on both the possibilities and the consequences of the breakdown of the distinction between the normally antithetical categories of the animate and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, the living and the dead." (from the introduction) 

ciao
mc otis