Abstract
In this paper, I propose to examine an important question in the philosophy of Descartes’ life sciences. The question revolves around the nature of the interactions between animals – in Descartes’ conception: natural automata – and their environment, as well as between different parts inside their body. The most pressing issue for us is to understand to what extent these interactions were conceived by Descartes as necessary or contingent events, which is often thought to be tied up with the problem of freedom. These issues arise because the traditional understanding of Descartes’ animal machines has extremely strong necessitarian – one could even say fatalistic – implications, leaving no room for any kind of freedom in their actions. Such readings frequently construe the bête-machine as a pre-programmed or program-controlled device, where the instruments of the supposed pre-programming take a rather rudimentary form: often they are imagined by analogy with simple mechanical devices or with simple hydraulic machines, and the most complex device to which animals are compared is the famous mechanical clock. Admittedly, this is not without some textual foundation in Descartes’ writings, as he himself was fond of the clockwork metaphor. As a result of this conception, however, more elaborate forms of communication between the internal parts of the animal machine – most notably feedback mechanisms – are explicitly excluded from the picture. This is unfortunate because no matter how deterministic the mechanical processes underlying the behavior of animals may be, the effects that more complex systems can generate, and which we observe in their functioning, are tightly interwoven with our modal concepts and with our concept of freedom. It is only natural to ask, then, how one can accommodate any conception of freedom with the strict determinism suggested by the paradigm cases of mechanical explanations in early modern science and especially by Descartes’ machine analogies, which were supposed to establish a close kinship between natural and artificial automata. As we shall see, Descartes’ thinking in these matters was more nuanced than it is generally recognized, and there is a kind of freedom that he attributed to animals and that enabled them, on Descartes’ view, to respond meaningfully to the contingencies of their environment.
The high degree of perfection displayed in some of their actions makes us suspect that animals do not have free will.
Descartes: Olympian Matters
Man is only free to the extent to which he is capable of not acting immediately. Only the flaccidity of his reflexes can ensure his freedom, for it allows time for him to ponder, deliberate, and choose: to create an interval, a distance between his actions. This distance is the space and requirement of freedom. Man becomes man through his deficiencies. If there were no faults in his basic reflexes, he would merely be an automaton.
E. M. Cioran
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Notes
- 1.
In an extremely interesting and telling footnote in Otto Mayr’s Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, we find the following comment: “Descartes […] was not incapable of perceiving more complex communication schemes connecting various systems of organs: in the action of a hand grasping some object, for example, he recognized some form of cooperation between eyes, brain, and hand that required reciprocal exchanges of information between the participating organs. [...] His account of this process has been interpreted by modern readers as an attempt to describe a closed feedback loop. One hesitates to accept this interpretation because here, for once, Descartes did not make himself sufficiently clear, perhaps for lack of a tangible mechanical model. At any rate, he failed to articulate the concept of the closed loop well enough that his contemporaries could comprehend it and put it to active use. He himself, too, overlooked the possibilities that this concept would have opened up for physiological theory: the concept of a cooperative interaction between the command function of the brain and perceptions of the senses would have made it possible to visualize systems that were able to react appropriately to unrehearsed situations and to meet challenges for which the correct response would not be programmed in advance. Such systems would no longer be controlled by a rigid program; instead they would have been free, within certain limits, to act according to decisions of their own. These possibilities Descartes did not exploit. His physiological thought remained under the domination of the analogy of the program-controlled automaton” (Mayr 1986, pp. 219–220 [note 61 to p. 66], my emphasis). Pace Mayr, it can be shown that Descartes did conceive of a closed feedback loop between the command function of the brain and the heart as the seat of most of the passions in the animal machine, but this would be beyond the scope of our present inquiry.
- 2.
This contrast is neatly drawn by Aalderink in his Philosophy, Scientific Knowledge, and Concept Formation in Guelincx and Descartes, where he states a well-known fact in a way which is very much to the point here: “[...] [Descartes’] is a completely different approach for determining what the objects of science are than the way in which Aristotelians determine them, as well as the principles and properties, of scientific disciplines. Descartes does not start by making a distinction between necessary and contingent or universal and particular things. He does not start with external objects at all but rather takes a completely different starting-point, namely, human knowledge. Only what can be clearly and distinctly cognized should be allowed as an object of science” (Aalderink 2009, p. 141–142.)
- 3.
Cf. Anstey 2016, p. 174.
- 4.
These would be analytical truths for Kant.
- 5.
AT X 421; CSM I 45–46.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
AT XI 34–35, TWOW 23.
- 8.
Unlike, for instance, Leibniz or Spinoza’s God whose only real option is to create this world. Descartes is notorious for his extremely voluntaristic conception of God. Famously, this voluntarism does not only extend to existing physical objects or conditions – like the initial division of the res extensa and the motion of its parts – but also to the laws of nature and to our a priori notions as it becomes manifest in Descartes’ ideas about the creation of the eternal truths (Cf. also Osler 1994 on the “Eternal truths and the laws of nature”). Descartes’ emphasis on the absolute omnipotence of God’s will entail that for him metaphysical necessity is the strongest form of necessity, overriding even logical necessity, which most philosophers would not accept. In the Conversation with Burman, Descartes contrasts the eternal truths with contingent truths in a slightly different way–Burman: “But what becomes of contingent truths, like ‘the dog is running’ and so on?” Descartes: “By ‘eternal truths’ the author here means what are called common notions, such as ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’, and so on. As for contingent truths, these relate to existing things. Contingent truths involve existing things, and vice versa” (Conversation, 52). Also, a Letter to Chanut seems to suggest that the spatial infinity of the world (which Descartes calls indefinite extension) is a conceptual or logical necessity, because we cannot imagine the boundary of the world without conceiving the same boundary as the beginning of the extension surrounding this finite and closed world, but it is metaphysically contingent that the world did not exist from all eternity, because it depended on God’s will to decide when to create it (To Chanut, June 1647; AT V 52–53, CSMK 320). In the context of human actions, I will subsume the manifestations of our free will under the rubric of metaphysical contingency because in those cases the relevant cause of the actions lays outside the mechanical-causal nexus of the world, and therefore they are utterly unpredictable, even if there are physical constraints on them, unlike in the case of God’s creative will.
- 9.
Descartes was often perceived as a “modern Democritus” in the seventeenth century (cf., for instance, Baillet 1691, vol. II, p. 227). But Democritus will be important also when we discuss Gassendi’s objections, while Laplace is only interesting insofar as those readers who want to argue for a sweeping determinism and precise mathematical predictability in Descartes’ natural philosophy would make a proto-Laplace of him. Also, whether the attribution of Laplacian determinism to Democritus is historically accurate is far from being obvious; cf. in this regard Bailey 1928, pp. 139–143. I am grateful to Stephen Gaukroger who called my attention to the fact that Laplace was more interested in predictability than in the question of determinism per se and to Pietro Omodeo who pointed out that the early modern understanding of Democritus was inaccurate.
- 10.
Daniel Garber discusses this issue in detail in his Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. He says, for example, that “[w]hat he [Descartes] has in mind here [in Principles Pt. IV Art. 204] is, no doubt, the possibility that God could have built a different machine for the same end, that there may be innumerable alternative mechanical explanations for the same phenomena, and that we are incapable of establishing with certainty which of the possible mechanical explanations is the correct one” (p. 109, emphasis in the original). Cf. also Gaukroger 2000, p. 135; and Osler 1994, p. 142–143.
- 11.
Vartanian 1963, p. 72.
- 12.
Thomas S. Hall, in his excellent “Descartes’ Physiological Method: Position, Principles, Examples,” makes the following important distinction: “From the point of view of scaling, it would be correct to think not of one but of three mechanical sciences as arising during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a celestial or megamechanics treating such very large things as the earth and the heavenly bodies; an intermediate mesomechanics having to do with usable machinery, automata, and so on, and with their biological analogs, namely, plants and animals and their visible parts; and finally a micromechanics concerned with subvisible things, ranging downward in size from those which would presently become visible through the microscope all the way to elementary particles. Descartes reasoned as a mechanist on all of these levels. In his biology he drew a number of comparisons between the body-parts and various sorts of visible machinery, water-works, clocks, and the like. He made no sharp distinction between meso- and micromechanics, but if we take the lower limit of (unaided) visibility as the line of division, the mesomechanical allusions in his works are, though trenchant, relatively rare: his biology is mostly micro-rather than mesomechanical” (Hall 1970, p. 78).
- 13.
In contemporary literature, such a view is explained, for example, by Robert E. Ulanowicz in his “Reconsidering the Notion of the Organic” (in: Konopka 2007, esp. pp. 105–107).
- 14.
By “deducible in the strong sense,” I mean that effects are not only deducible from their causes once we know them but that they are also predictable by an ideal observer who has access to all the information to perform the relevant calculation. The fact that humans are hardly ever in this position even according to Descartes should not worry us too much at this stage. I shall talk more about this issue in the second part.
- 15.
Letter to Morin, 12 September 1638 (AT II 368, CSMK 122). Cf. also Descartes’ Letter to Plempius for Fromondus, 3 October 1637 (AT I 421-422, CSMK 65).
- 16.
Descartes, the engineer, knows very well that mere geometrical similitude is not enough to conserve the proportion of the force of the same mechanical devices of different scales. There are further material constraints on what the science of mechanics can do, but these additional constraints may also come under the same science. Cf. Descartes’ Letter to Mersenne, 11 October 1638, AT II 381, CSMK 125. Characteristically, in that letter, Descartes talks about mechanical machines, animals, and children in the same context.
- 17.
The importance of this move and the subsequent abandoning of the ancient and Renaissance conviction that the world is perfectly suited to our senses cannot be overstated, and it is described by many, cf., for example, Hamou 2001, p. 15 regarding vision and Cohen 1984, p. 101 regarding sounds and acoustics.
- 18.
To Mersenne, 20 November 1629 (AT I 73, CSMK 9–10).
- 19.
AT XI 37–38, TWOW 25; emphasis mine.
- 20.
AT XI 46, TWOW 30; emphasis mine.
- 21.
- 22.
Cf., for instance, Sutton 1998, pp. 75–81.
- 23.
For a similar point made about working artifacts in the mechanical tradition, see Berryman 2009, p. 203.
- 24.
By the term “blind,” I simply mean here “non-phenomenologically conscious,” and not “random” or “non-teleological.”
- 25.
AT VII 269–270, CSM II 188.
- 26.
He writes just a few lines before the quote above that “the brutes have nerves, animal spirits and a brain, and in the brain there is a principle of cognition that receives the messages from the spirits in an exactly similar fashion [as in humans] and thus completes the act of sense-perception” (ibid.).
- 27.
AT VII 357–358, CSMK 247–248.
- 28.
Hume famously came to the opposite conclusion on the same basis, i.e., by observing the behavior of animals. This is, of course, also due to their different conceptions of what thinking is, what ideas are, etc. But the same a posteriori investigation led the Aristotelian tradition too to a contrary opinion. As Dennis Des Chene explains in his Physiologia: “Among the most visible operations of animals are raising their young, building webs or nests, looking for food, and fighting or avoiding their enemies. For the Aristotelians, the thought that such actions could be explained solely in terms of the dispositions of animal bodies was a pipe dream. The resources of their science – or of Descartes’s – were not up to the task. The independence of animals’ actions from immediate stimuli, the coordination of their actions, the flexibility in their means, all told against any explanation that did not take into account the ends to which those actions are directed” (Des Chene 1996, p. 181). Descartes and the Cartesians constitute the small minority coming to the conclusion that animals do not have minds by observing them. For example, Louis de la Forge, whom I cannot discuss here in detail, defended the Cartesian conception in length in Chapter 4 of his Treatise on the Human Mind.
- 29.
CSM I 140.
- 30.
AT VI 57. “Occurrence” in French in its primary meaning is closely related to the concept of chance or unforeseeable event. Descartes himself uses it in similar meaning elsewhere, for instance, in his Letter to Huygens, 6 June 1639, when he writes about the possible publication of Le Monde. He tells Huygens he does not have a firm determination what to do with the manuscript; his aim is rather “to be guided by circumstances” (CSMK 136); “j’ay dessein [...] de me regler selon les occurrences” (AT II 552).
- 31.
It would be an easy, though rather cheap, way to brush aside this question by pointing to the fact that given Descartes’ positive notion of free will, humans can genuinely originate events in the physical world which would not have occurred otherwise out of the totality of the determination in matter. This means that animals must face events from time to time which are contingent events of the world, for example, when a dog pays attention to its keeper who decides – freely – to train the dog a new skill. An example of this is reported by Gassendi in his objections: “I have seen a dog matching his barks to the sound of a trumpet, so as to imitate all the changes in the notes, whether sharp or flat, or slow or fast. And it managed to do this even when the tempo of the notes was arbitrarily and unexpectedly speeded up, or when the notes were unexpectedly drawn out” (AT VII 270, CSM II 189). The action of the dog’s master is genuinely contingent for Descartes (in a metaphysical sense, since the relevant cause, i.e., human free will, lays outside the physical world), and the dog needs to respond to it.
- 32.
To Mesland, 2 May 1644, AT IV 117, CSMK 234. Descartes elaborates on his conception of the positive faculty of the freedom of the will in a later Letter to Mesland (9 February 1645), which I shall discuss as we proceed.
- 33.
This is also the only passage where Descartes makes an explicit statement about the kind of freedom which is applicable to animals.
- 34.
By “voluntary action” I simply mean here any action which is described as such in everyday situations and not the metaphysically loaded concept of actions proceeding from free will (for it is clear that no actions of animals would count as voluntary under that description). Thus the flight of the sheep from the wolf in Arnauld’s objection to Descartes (AT VII 204–205, CSM II 144) is voluntary, as is our automatic switching on of the light in the hallway when we arrive home in the dark. Involuntary in this context is equal to accidental, like the sheep’s inadvertent stepping on an insect while running away from the wolf. The fact that we are prepared to make such a distinction at all indicates our willingness to ascribe some kind of agency to animals, and I hope that my analysis here might contribute to our understanding of how this willingness can be maintained and justified in the case of Descartes’ animal machines.
- 35.
AT III 461, CSMK 200–201 (my emphasis).
- 36.
In this, the early modern notion of spontaneity as we find it in Descartes, Gassendi, and others is different from the way it was introduced into the philosophical discussion. In its most prominent occurrence, spontaneity is the standard Latin translation of the Greek term τὸ αὐτόματον, which is at the center of Aristotle’s attention in Chapters 4–6 of the second book of the Physics. Because of the close association of spontaneity to free will in modern English, certain more recent translations of Aristotle prefer to render the Greek original term as the automatic (cf., for instance, William Charlton’s translation of the Physics and his commentary to the relevant chapters on p. 105). Whatever our understanding of the Greek original might be, it is certain that by the expression τὸ αὐτόματον, Aristotle refers to chance events, viz., to events which neither always happen the same way nor for the most part. It is not that they are uncaused, for they are the outcome of causal processes, but we are often ignorant about their causes. It would be tempting to link this conception of contingency to the concept of spontaneity in Descartes, but that is impossible because all the events we find under the umbrella of spontaneous actions in Descartes do happen in the way they do at least for the most part, if not always. The only – rather weak – link we find between the two usages is that spontaneous actions do seem to us to happen by themselves.
- 37.
AT VIII 62, CSM I 240–241.
- 38.
There are reminiscences of the discussion of fire in this Letter to Regius in Part 4 of the Principles where Descartes talks about the nature of fire and he compares it to the nature of air, but he does not mention the greater perfection of fire to that which the “regular” heat possesses which we find in objects. But Descartes’ characterization of fire in the Letter to Regius above is not far from traditional conceptions. For instance, fire is described similarly and is even mentioned in a similar context, in Coëffeteau’s Tableau des Passions from 1620. Having established that every corruptible creature seeks what is beneficial and shuns what is harmful, we learn that “they have a power to resist and to combat what may hinder their actions or destroy their being. For example, fire does not only possess a certain lightness to go upwards, but it has also received from nature the heat by means of which it resists and combats anything that is contrary to its action” (Coëffeteau 1620, Chap. I, p. 4; my translation).
- 39.
It is worth noting, though, that the fire without light is the main principle of life in all animate beings.
- 40.
This is, of course, a caricature of what goes on in the sheep. The sheep does not literally perceive the wolf as a constraint (probably), but it is still useful to retell their story in the language of our current inquiry, even when it results in caricatural sentences.
- 41.
Sarasohn 1996, p. 69. Sarasohn has written extensively on this subject and on Gassendi’s relation to Hobbes in these matters in her book (see Chapter 6, especially pp. 124–134). These thinkers believe that animals are always pushed toward one direction by external forces. In this respect, they are like stones from the inanimate part of nature, but children also work according to the same principles (the kind of “choice” available to all of these classes is libentia). Genuine human liberty (libertas) resides in our ability later in our life not to follow these direct prompts of nature but to step back to the position of indifference and chose from an alternative of two options (Hobbes denied this possibility). Libentia, by contrast, which in Gassendi stands for “voluntary motion,” is “movement in one direction only” (op. cit. 128). Now, “voluntary” in this context stands for spontaneous, but not in the sense that it is unnecessitated by mechanical causes. Indeed, the connotations we tend to associate with spontaneity hardly seem appropriate in this context. The question of philosophical ancestry as it was perceived by thinkers of the early modern period becomes interesting at this point. I have already mentioned that Descartes was often seen as a modern Democritus by his peers. Gassendi builds his Epicurean system in a sense against the materialism of Hobbes, which Gassendi relates to Democritism where everything in the cosmos is governed by natural necessity (cf. Sarasohn, op. cit. 29). Such a conception would be a great threat to human freedom according to Gassendi, yet, as we have seen, animals do not seem to take advantage in their actions of the indeterminacy of Epicurean physics–and whether the indeterministic swerve of particles would solve anything when it comes to human or animal freedom is a different question altogether, which I cannot pursue here (see a good discussion of the problem in Antonia Lolordo’s The Activity of Matter in Gassendi’s Physics, in: Garber & Nadler (eds.) 2005).
- 42.
As Descartes writes to Hyperaspistes about children, “the younger they are, the less liberty they have” (AT III 424, CSMK 190).
- 43.
Descartes speaks about this explicitly to Regius with regard to operations in which the mind is involved. He writes: “where you say ‘Willing and understanding differ only as different ways of acting in regard to different objects’, I would prefer ‘They differ only as the activity and passivity of one and the same substance.’ For strictly speaking, understanding is the passivity of the mind and willing is its activity; but because we cannot will anything without understanding what we will, and we scarcely ever understand something without at the same time willing something, we do not easily distinguish in this matter passivity from activity” (To Regius, May 1641, AT III 372, CSMK 182). Coëffeteau also devotes several pages of eloquence to the same distinction in the Préface of his Tableau des Passions. Finally, Edgar A. Singer, Jr. has a charming essay On Spontaneiy from 1925. In that essay, he calls sensibility what I call the knowledge side of an action and spontaneity what I call the volition side. He opens the discussion with an interesting remark: “as the world goes, if we would complete our account of nature’s spectacle, our recognition of life as ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ drives us beyond biology to invent the expressions of psychology: the respects in which lives on different levels of behavior differ in behavior must be set forth in terms of mind. With entire sympathy we recall the moment when Aristotle was forced to introduce psychological color into his nature-painting, that animal life might stand forth from the background of mere life (i.e., merely vegetative life). He gave to the animal the faculties of sensibility and spontaneity. Sensibility and spontaneity: these two traits of mentality appeared on the scene of history simultaneously and side by side; their united function to raise their possessor to a higher plane of animate being. Perhaps, after all, there is little occasion for surprise if, in the phrase to which our opening sentence alludes, I ventured the opinion that ‘this pair might profitably continue to be driven abreast,’—for I doubted whether either could go far without the other” (Singer 1925, p. 421).
- 44.
And this is the way which is familiar from the Fourth Meditation where this model is projected onto the working of the intellect. The other form of freedom is when we make a greater use of our positive power to determine ourselves despite our clear perception of what is good, and we willingly choose the worse option. This kind of freedom is not available to animals, and it clearly involves forcing our body to operate against a greater mechanical friction in the sense I have just explained, because it requires extra effort from our part. I believe the role of the bodily mechanisms, especially those of the passions, is integral to Descartes’ thoughts about freedom, and this recognition can largely contribute to a correct understanding of his distinction between the two kinds of freedom when he writes: “[...] a greater freedom consists either in a greater facility in determining oneself or in a greater use of the positive power which we have of following the worse although we see the better. If we follow the course which appears to have the most reasons in its favour, we determine ourselves more easily; but if we follow the opposite, we make more use of that positive power; and thus we can always act more freely in those cases in which we see much more good than evil than in those cases which are called αδιαφορα or indifferent” (AT IV 174, CSMK 246). As a marginal remark, one could argue that Spinoza will reject the second kind of freedom and will operate with a single notion of freedom which derives from the Cartesian concept of spontaneity.
- 45.
Ibid; emphasis mine.
- 46.
We should note here a further important difference between Descartes’ negative and positive power of freedom: it is that the positive, active power of determining ourselves in completely indifferent situations, or contrary to our best knowledge, always originates from a single center of action, namely, the autonomous human mind, whereas the negative power of spontaneity is a decentralized power. Just as fire does not have a center from which its power of self-maintenance springs, but its parts possess qualities which mutually preserve each other, the animal or the human body machine does not have a center either from which its spontaneity proceeds. The pineal gland and the heart can be regarded as centers from specific vantage points – when, for example, our concern is with finding the main cognitive unit inside the machine or when we seek what empowers all the functions in it – but the general spontaneity of the machine is the sum of the spontaneous motions of all of its parts. This thought has not received sufficient attention from those who read Descartes in a political context and emphasize his royalist leanings and the promotion of more centralized and authoritarian systems even with his physiological metaphors, but this is not the place to pursue these questions in detail. Suffice it to allude here to some contemporary readings of Descartes which emphasize the forces of decentralization in his physiology, as, for instance, John Sutton does in his brilliant monograph on memory (Sutton 1998). Of course, decentralization in the domain of physiology might provoke similar anxiety to the one that some would feel about the decentralization of political power. The closing passage from Berthier’s 1914 article captures magnificently the anxiety attached to Descartes’ thoughts on animals even as late as in the twentieth century: Ainsi donc, tant en leur formation qu’en leur constitution et en leur fonctionnement, les corps organisés ne diffèrent des corps inorganisés, des machines et automates, que dans la mesure où l’art de la Nature l’emporte sur celui de l’homme: ils ne doivent être conçus que comme des assemblages plus ou moins compliqués de poulies, de ressorts, de leviers, de matras, de cornues: un animal, c’est un cabinet de chimie, une usine. Ou plutôt non! Dans le cabinet de chimie, dans l’usine, il ne se passe rien hors de l’initiative du chimiste, de l’ingénieur; les appareils ne se mettent pas en marche tout seuls ni les drogues ne se mélangent d’elles-mêmes. Or, dans le corps, il n’y a pas d’ingénieur, de chimiste; aucune intelligence ne préside du dedans à ses fonctions. Tout ce que nous en pouvons connaître clairement et distinctement se ramène à des combinaisons de tourbillons, à des changements dans la disposition relative des parties, à des mouvements déterminés uniquement par des causes actuelles et mécaniques, en dernière analyse, & des modifications purement géométriques d’une étendue homogène, continue, indéfinie. This was once a frightening perspective, and one cannot stress enough Descartes’ boldness in these matters. And finally, in writing about decentralization and frightening perspectives, I should not pass over in silence Descartes’ very first mention of animals in his correspondence–not the animal-machine doctrine but of animals tout court. The Copernican revolution and man’s subsequent expulsion from the center of creation – at least in a cosmological sense – provoked great anxiety in many, but not in Descartes, who closed his Letter to Ferrier (13 November 1629) by expressing his hope that they would be able to see whether there were animals on the Moon (Ferrier was a craftsman with whom Descartes wanted to build powerful telescopes; cf. AT I 69). Descartes imagined his mechanical Universe populated with living machines everywhere.
- 47.
Cordemoy’s Philosophical Discourse Concerning Speech is an extremely interesting elaboration on Descartes’ rather sketchy remarks from this point of view, and there is yet great potential in reconstructing a Cartesian theory of natural signs and understanding its role in the Cartesian theory of the bête-machine (cf., for instance Rodis-Lewis 1966).
- 48.
Descartes to the Marquess of Newcastle, 23 November 1646 (AT IV 575, CSMK 304).
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Kekedi, B. (2019). Necessity, Contingency, and Freedom in Descartes’ Physiology: Spontaneity in Nature. In: Omodeo, P.D., Garau, R. (eds) Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 332. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67378-3_12
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