Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751)

The year 2001 marks the 250th anniversary of la Mettrie's death. This paper commemorates his stormy life and the contribution he made to the neurosciences. Trained as a physician, la Mattrie soon fell out with both the medical and ecclesiastical authorities and was exiled first to the Netherlands and then to Frederick the Great's circle of intellectuals at Sans Souci (Berlin). The two works which are of greatest interest to the readers of this journal are the 1745 Histoire Naturelle de l'âme (retitled Traité de l'âme in 1751) and the 1747 l'Homme Machine. Both are collected in the 1751 Oeuvres Philosophiques. This paper reviews these two ground-breaking tracts noting that, although they are both materialistic, and hence worthy of the odium theologicum into which they fell, they are not materialistic in the Cartesian sense. La Mettrie is dismissive of the Cartesian concept of inanimate matter and the related notion of the 'beast-machine'. Instead, he sees an unbroken continuity between humans and the rest of nature. His vision is in many ways far ahead of its time and prefigures some of the dilemmas and concerns which our evolutionary neuroscience presents today: how is consciousness related to the goings on in the cerebrum? How can we be held responsible for what we do if all is material? His biographer, Raymond Boissier, writes that we can recognise in him an obscure predecessor of Lamarck and a prophet of things to come.