Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Background

He was born at St. Malo, France, December 25, 1709. He was the son of a prosperous textile merchant.

Education

At Paris he studied theology and seemed destined for the clergy in the Jansenist sect. But a doctor at St. Malo aroused in him an interest in medicine and he went to Leiden in 1733 to study under the famous Hermann Boerhaave.

Career

Having attained some fame himself as a physician, he was appointed surgeon to the Royal Guard at Paris. Observation of his own thoughts and sensations when stricken with a fever led him to study the relationship of the soul to the body, and he concluded that the soul is only a function of the heart and the brain. When his views were published in Histoire naturelle de l'âmel'ame (1745; "Natural History of the Soul"), they were attacked by clergy and rival physicians alike.

La Mettrie fled to Leiden where he developed his views into an even more thorough-going materialism. In L'Homme machine (1748; "Man a Machine") he argued that man is but a complex arrangement of matter. Those who maintain that thinking requires a non-corporeal soul have not shown that the body is incapable of thinking. There can be ideas only if the body has first been impressed through the senses. The lower animals also have sense organs and man is only a superior animal. There is no soul that survives the dissolution of the body. Sensuous pleasure is the aim of life, and virtue can have no basis other than self-love. The posthumous L'Art de Jouir (1751; "The Art of Enjoyment") also expounded these views. The storm raised by these unorthodox opinions made it necessary for La Mettrie to leave Leiden. In 1748 he was given a position as court reader by Frederick the Great in Berlin.

Achievements

• La Mettrie is considered one of the first French materialists, most influential determinists of the eighteenth century.
  
  He is best known for his work L'homme machine ("Machine Man" or "The Human Mechanism").

Works

More photos

• book

  • Man A Machine

    (This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)

Connections

teacher:

Hermann Boerhaave