Indigenous Perspectivism and the Anti-Cartesian Animals of Lahontan and Leibniz

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.