Filosofen met snorhaartjes

Over de wijsheid van katten in negentiende-eeuwse Franse natuurgeschiedenissen

Samenvatting

The distance between humans and pets, though physically small, is unbridgeable when it comes to knowing one another’s thoughts and feelings. And yet three nineteenth-century French ailurophiles were convinced they could understand the innermost feelings of cats. Champfleury (Jules Husson), Gaston Percheron and Alexandre Landrin put forth arguments in favour of cats’ intelligence, because they believed the intellectual capacities of these animals to have been structurally denied by scientists and philosophers before them. This article explores how these three men constructed images of feline wisdom in spite of their undeniable inability to see inside the mind of a cat.