La mettrie biography
La mettrie man a machine summary!
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (December 25, – November 11, ) was a Frenchphysician and philosopher, the earliest of the materialist writers of the Enlightenment.
As a physician, he made a study of his own hallucinations during a fever and published Histoire naturelle de l'âme (Natural History of the Soul, ), concluding that psychical phenomena could be explained by organic changes in the body and brain.
Diderot meaning
This provoked an outcry which forced him to leave France and go to Leiden, where he further developed his theories in L'Homme machine (Man a Machine, ), applying Rene Descartes’ mechanistic ideas on animals to human behavior.
The book was burned and the feeling against him was so strong that he was compelled to leave the Netherlands in
He was received in Berlin by Frederick the Great, who allowed him to practice medicine and made him a court reader.
There La Mettrie wrote his major book Discours sur le bonheur (), and La Volupté,
