La Mettrie, Julien Offray de

Introduction

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was a physician and philosopher who was one of the key figures of the Radical Enlightenment. This is a brief survey of his life and work.

Life and Work

L’Homme-Machine or Man a Machine is the best-known work of La Mettrie, a medical doctor and philosopher who was born in Saint-Malo (Brittany) in 1709 and died in 1751 in Berlin, where he was an intellectual-in-residence at Frederick II’s court – not a doctor, as it sometimes claimed – of indigestion, food poisoning, or peritonitis after a particularly rich meal involving a whole pheasant pasty with truffles (something Voltaire made much of, as we shall see below). He had been forced to flee from France earlier due to his medical polemics and then from the famously tolerant Low Countries due to his provocative ideas, usually traced back to his classic materialist contribution, Man a Machine, but in fact his work of moral philosophy, known in its final title as Discours sur le Bonheur (Discourse...