Hieronymus Rorarius

Hieronymus Rorarius (1485-1556) was Papal nuncio to the court of Ferdinand of Hungary. In a 1554 pamphlet, Rorarius maintained that beasts make better use of reason than men do. After Gabriel Naude republished the book in 1648, it was reprinted several times, and discussed at length by Pierre Bayle's entry on Rorarius in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, where it introduced a critical discussion of the nature of the soul and of Leibniz's philosophy.