Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709 to 1751) was a French physician and philosopher, one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment. Born at Saint-Malo, the son of a prosperous textile merchant, he studied theology and then philosophy and natural science before taking up medicine under Hermann Boerhaave. He is best known for L'homme machine (Man a Machine, 1747), in which he held that humans are complex animals with no more soul than other animals, that the mind is part of the body, and that life should be lived to produce pleasure. His views were so controversial that he had to flee France and settle in Berlin, and his materialism most directly influenced the physician Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis.