Geburtstag: 25. Dezember 1709
Todesdatum: 11. November 1751
Andere Namen:Julien Offroy De La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie war ein französischer Arzt und Philosoph. Bekanntheit erlangte er vor allem durch sein konsequent materialistisches Menschenbild, weswegen er seinen Zeitgenossen als enfant terrible der Aufklärung galt.
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
La Mettrie: Der Mensch eine Maschine. Berlin 1875, www. zeno. org
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Context: [W]e must admit, with the same frankness, that we are ignorant whether matter has in itself the faculty of feeling, or only the power of acquiring it by those modifications or forms to which matter is susceptible; for it is true that this faculty of feeling appears only in organic bodies.
This is then another new faculty which might exist only potentially in matter, like all the others which have been mentioned; and this was the hypothesis of the ancients, whose philosophy, full of insight and penetration, deserves to be raised above the ruins of the philosophy of the moderns.<!--p.160
Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Context: Descartes, a genius made to blaze new paths and to go astray in them, supposed with some other philosophers that God is the only efficient cause of motion, and that every instant He communicates motion to all bodies. But this opinion is but an hypothesis which he tried to adjust to the light of faith; and in so doing he was no longer attempting to speak as a philosopher or to philosophers. Above all he was not addressing those who can be convinced only by the force of evidence.<!--p.158
Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Context: We have now but to prove a third attribute: I mean the faculty of feeling which the philosophers of all centuries have found in this same substance.... [T]he Cartesians have made, in vain, to rob matter of this faculty. But in order to avoid insurmountable difficulties, they have flung themselves into a labyrinth from which they have thought to escape by this absurd system "that animals are pure machines."
An opinion so absurd has never gained admittance among philosophers... Experience gives us no less proof of the faculty of feeling in animals than of feeling in men.
Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Context: Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence... would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so.<!--pp.100-102
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Context: It is not enough for a wise man to study nature and truth; he should dare state truth for the benefit of the few who are willing and able to think.<!--p. 85
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Context: Let us... take in our hands the staff of experience... To be blind and to think that one can do without this staff is the worst kind of blindness.<!--p. 89
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Context: We know in bodies only matter, and we observe the faculty of feeling only in bodies: on what foundation then can we erect an ideal being, disowned by all our knowledge?<!--p.160
Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Preface, Oeuvres philosophiques de Monsieur de La Mettrie (1764) as quoted by Paul Carus, The Mechanistic Principle and the Non-mechanical (1913) p. 102. https://books.google.com/books?id=wGNRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA102
— Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Ch. V Concerning the Moving Force of Matter, p.156
