Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709 to 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 1747 work L'homme machine, translated as Man a Machine. La Mettrie took the position that humans are complex animals and that they no more have souls than other animals do. He considered the mind to be part of the body and argued that life should be lived so as to produce pleasure, a view usually called hedonism. His opinions were so controversial that he had to flee France and settle in Berlin. The atlas records him as a physician whose medical training led him to a materialist account of mind, a position that was held and disputed in his own century.