author
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1709–1751
A bold Enlightenment thinker, this French physician-philosopher became famous for arguing that the mind and body were inseparable. His most provocative book, Man a Machine, helped make him one of the earliest and most controversial materialists of the 18th century.
1 Audiobook
Man a Machine
by Julien Offray de La Mettrie
About the author
Born in Saint-Malo in 1709, Julien Offray de La Mettrie trained as a physician and built his philosophical ideas out of medicine, physiology, and close observation of the human body. He is remembered as an early French materialist of the Enlightenment, a writer who challenged the idea that the soul could be separated from bodily life.
His best-known work, L'Homme machine (Man a Machine), published in 1747, argued in strikingly direct terms that human thought and feeling arise from physical processes. That view made him admired by some readers and deeply shocking to others, and it placed him among the most radical voices of his era.
La Mettrie's writings brought him lasting notoriety as well as trouble in his own lifetime. He spent his final years in Potsdam, where he died in 1751, but his work continued to echo through later debates about psychology, behavior, and the relationship between mind and body.