La Mettrie
La Mettrie, Julien Offray De / Clarke, Desmond M. / Thomson, Ann
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709 51), author of Machine Man (1747), was the most uncompromising of the materialists of the eighteenth century, and the provocative title of his work ensured it a succes de scandale in his own time. It was however a serious, if polemical, attempt to provide an explanation of the workings of the human body and mind in purely material terms and to show that thought was the product of the workings of the brain alon...