Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

See: Physician, Philosopher, 18th-Century Philosophy, French Materialism, Mind–Body Problem.

References

(Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Offray_de_La_Mettrie Retrieved:2015-11-29.
- Julien 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] or "The Human Mechanism").

↑ For La Mettrie's birth in literature one finds at least three different calendar dates; the date given here is most probably the correct one. Cf.: Birgit Christensen: Ironie und Skepsis, Würzburg 1996, p. 245, fn. 2
↑ The 1748 English translation bore the title Man a machine, but Ann Thomson, in her recent translation, chooses the title Machine man (Thomson 1996)

(Mettrie, 1748a) ⇒ Julien Offray de La Mettrie. (1748). “L'Homme Machine (Man a Machine)."

(Mettrie, 1748b) ⇒ Julien Offray de La Mettrie. (1748). “L'Homme Plante (Man a Plant)."
- QUOTE: Let him who so wishes take pleasure in boring us with all the wonders of nature: let one spend his life observing insects, another counting the tiny bones in the hearing membrane of certain fish, even in measuring, if you will, how far a flea can jump, not to mention so many other wretched objects of study; for myself, who am curious only about philosophy, who am sorry only not to be able to extend its horizons, active nature will always be my sole point of view; I love to see it from afar, in its breadth and its entirety, and not in specifics or in little details, which, although to some extent necessary in all the sciences, are generally the mark of little genius among those who devote themselves to them.