La mettrie biography

The philosophes, however, found his materialism, moral relativism, hedonistic ethics, and atheism much too dangerous to espouse. Even other materialists, such as the Baron d'Holbach — and Denis Diderot — , did not acknowledge their debt to such a radical thinker. La Mettrie's medical materialism, grounded in the scientific issues of his day, is his most significant contribution to the French Enlightenment and the history of philosophy.

Thomson, Ann. Vartanian, Aram. Princeton, Wellman, Kathleen. La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment. Durham, N. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 9, Retrieved January 09, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy De — gale. Europe, to Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World.

La mettrie biography

Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. La Mettrie is most remembered for taking the position that humans are complex animals and no more have souls than other animals do. He considered that the mind is part of the body and that life should be lived so as to produce pleasure hedonism. His views were so controversial that he had to flee France and settle in Berlin.

La Mettrie was born at Saint-Malo in Brittany on November 23, , and was the son of a prosperous textile merchant. His initial schooling took place in the colleges of Coutances and Caen. In , La Mettrie entered the College d'Harcourt to study philosophy and natural science, probably graduating around At this time, D'Harcourt was pioneering the teaching of Cartesianism in France.

It was under Boerhaave that La Mettrie was influenced to try to bring changes to medical education in France. After his studies at D'Harcourt, La Mettrie decided to take up the profession of medicine. For five years, La Mettrie studied at faculty of medicine in Paris, and enjoyed the mentorship of Hunauld. In , however, he departed for Leiden to study under the famous Herman Boerhaave.

His stay in Holland proved to be short but influential. In the following years, La Mettrie settled down to professional medical practice in his home region of Saint-Malo, disseminating the works and theories of Boerhaave through the publication and translation of several works. He married in but the marriage, which produced two children, proved an unhappy one.

This experience would instill in him a deep aversion to violence which is evident in his philosophical writings. It was in these years, during an attack of fever , that he made observations on himself with reference to the action of quickened blood circulation upon thought, which led him to the conclusion that mental processes were to be accounted for as the effects of organic changes in the brain and nervous system.

So great was the outcry caused by its publication that La Mettrie was forced to quit his position with the French Guards, taking refuge in Leiden. The ethical implications of these principles would later be worked out in his Discours sur le bonheur ; La Mettrie considered it his magnum opus. This was the idea which brought him the enmity of virtually all thinkers of the French Enlightenment , and a damnatio memoriae [ 8 ] which was lifted only a century later by Friedrich Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus.

Julien de La Mettrie is considered one of the most influential determinists of the eighteenth century. He believed that mental processes were caused by the body. He expressed these thoughts in his most important work Man a Machine. There he also expressed his belief that humans worked like a machine. This theory can be considered to build off the work of Descartes and his approach to the human body working as a machine.

Although he helped further Descartes' view of mechanization in explaining human bodily behavior, he argued against Descartes' dualistic view on the mind. His opinions were so strong that he stated that Descartes was actually a materialist in regards to the mind. The philosopher David Skrbina considers La Mettrie an adherent of "vitalistic materialism": [ 11 ].

To him, mind was a very real entity, and clearly it was embedded in a material cosmos. An obvious solution, therefore, was to see matter itself as inherently dynamic, capable of feeling, even intelligent. Motion and mind derive from some inherent powers of life or sentience that dwell in matter itself or in the organizational properties of matter.

That view, sometimes called vitalistic materialism, is the one that LaMettrie—and later Diderot—adopted. Commentators often portray LaMettrie as a mechanist because it is assumed that anyone who denies the spiritual realm must see all things, and in particular all living things, as products of dead matter. It is quite common, even today, to equate materialism with mechanism.

But, as has been noted, the two are logically independent. He argued that humans were just complex animals. He believed that humans and animals were only different in regards to the complexity that matter was organized. Paul, Trench, Trubner, I, Sec. IV, Ch. Mortain, France, Best biographical account. Perkins, Jean. Poritzky, J. Berlin, Best general treatment of La Mettrie's philosophy.

Thomson, Ann. Vartanian, Aram. Critical edition with introductory monograph and notes. Wright, John P. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de — gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. More From encyclopedia. La Meri b. La Meri — La Maurice National Park. La Marsa Convention.

La Marr, Barbara c. La Marque. La Marmora. La Malinche. La Malbaie. He was born on December 25, , in Saint-Malo. Initially, La Mettrie studied theology in Paris and seemed destined to become a Jansenist priest. However, his interest in medicine was sparked by a practicing physician in Saint-Malo, which led him to pursue the study of medicine in Leiden in under the renowned Herman Boerhaave, whose works he later translated into French.

After gaining recognition as a physician, La Mettrie secured a position as a surgeon in the Royal Guard in Paris. It was during a bout of illness, where he experienced feverish delirium, that he began contemplating the relationship between the soul and the body.