Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest outspoken materialists of the Enlightenment. Trained in medicine under Herman Boerhaave at Leiden, he drew on medicine and anatomy to argue that thought depends wholly on the body. His Natural History of the Soul caused a scandal in France, and Man a Machine, published anonymously in Leiden in 1748, forced him to leave the Netherlands. He spent his last years in Berlin at the court of Frederick the Great, writing on happiness and pleasure.

Key ideas

• The human being is a machine: mental life arises from the organisation of the body and brain.
• Humans differ from other animals in degree, not in kind.
• There is no immaterial soul; changes in the body, such as illness, fatigue or drugs, change the mind.
• Happiness depends largely on bodily constitution and pleasure rather than on virtue alone, a view that shocked his contemporaries.

Major works

• Man a Machine (1748)
• Natural History of the Soul (1745)
• Anti-Seneca, or Discourse on Happiness (1748)

In the Book corner

• Man a Machine 1747 (title page dated 1748) · Intermediate
  A short, provocative essay, published anonymously in Leiden, that extends Descartes' account of animals as machines to human beings and drops the…

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