- Julien Offray de La Mettrie
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Julien Offray de La Mettrie 
Julien Offray de La MettrieFull name Julien Offray de La Mettrie Born 19 December 1709
Saint-Malo, FranceDied 11 November 1751 (aged 41)
Berlin, PrussiaEra 18th-century philosophy Region Western Philosophy School French materialism Main interests Mind-body problem Julien Offray de La Mettrie (November 23, 1709 [1] – November 11, 1751) was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment. He is best known for his work L'homme machine ("Machine man"[2]), wherein he rejected the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, and proposed the metaphor of the human being as machine.
Contents
Life and work
Early years
La Mettrie was born at Saint-Malo in Brittany on December 25, 1709 and was the son of a prosperous textile merchant. His initial schooling took place in the colleges of Coutances and Caen. After attending the Collège du Plessis in Paris, he seems to have acquired a vocational interest in becoming a clergyman, but after studying theology in the Jansenist schools for some years, his interests turned away from the Church. In 1725, La Mettrie entered the College d'Harcourt to study philosophy and natural science, probably graduating around 1727. At this time, d'Harcourt was pioneering the teaching of Cartesianism in France.[3]
Medical career
After his studies at d'Harcourt, La Mettrie decided to take up the profession of medicine. A friend of the La Mettrie family, François-Joseph Hunauld, who was about to take the chair of anatomy at the Jardin du Roi, seems to have influenced him in this decision. For five years, La Mettrie studied at faculty of medicine in Paris, and enjoyed the mentorship of Hunauld.[4]
In 1733, 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 1739 but the marriage, which produced two children, proved an unhappy one. In 1742, La Mettrie left his family and travelled to Paris, where he obtained the appointment of surgeon to the Gardes Francaises regiment, taking part in several battles during the War of the Austrian Succession. This experience would instill in him a deep aversion to violence which is evident in his philosophical writings. Much of his time, however, was spent in Paris, and it is likely that during this time he made the acquaintance of Maupertuis and the Marquise de Chatelet.[5]
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. This conclusion he worked out in his earliest philosophical work, the Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745). 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, where he developed his doctrines still more boldly and completely in L'Homme machine a hastily-written treatise based upon consistently materialistic and quasi-atheistic principles.[6] La Mettrie's materialism was in many ways the product of his medical concerns, drawing on the work of 17th-century predecessors such as the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy.[7]
Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, also a native of Saint-Malo, helped La Mettrie find refuge in Prussia.
The ethical implications of these principles would later be worked out in his Discours sur le bonheur, that book La Mettrie considered his Magnum opus.[8] Here he developed his theory of remorse, i.e. his view about the inauspicious effects of the feelings of guilt acquired at early age during the process of enculturation. This was the idea which brought him the enmity of virtually all thinkers of the French enlightenment, and a Damnatio memoriae[9] which was lifted only a century later by Friedrich Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus.
Flight to Prussia
The court of Frederick the Great provided La Mettrie with a refuge in which to write and publish his worksPart of a series on Hedonism ThinkersJeremy Bentham · Julien Offray de La Mettrie · Aristippus of Cyrene · Epicurus · Michel Onfray · Aristippus the Younger · Hermarchus · Lucretius · Pierre Gassendi · Metrodorus of Lampsacus · Zeno of SidonSchools of hedonismKey conceptsaponia · ataraxia · Eudaimonia · Happiness · Hedone · Pain · Pleasure · Sensation · Suffering · Tetrapharmakos
