180109 SE Radical Franch Philospohy: La Mettrie (2013W)

Following my seminar on De Sade, this course will explore of some of the most salient aspects of the thought of Julien Offroy de la Mettrie (1709-51), a French Physician, materialist and atheist. The seminar seeks to relate La Mettrie's ideas about medicine, science, politics and religion to the historical, socio-political, and intellectual context of the radical enlightenment. To that aim, the seminar comprises a concise introduction to the literary and philosophical oeuvre of La Mettrie, with special reference to his more famous texts. During the seminar these early modern conceptualisations of new epistemiologies will be examined in grater detail and by means of close readings of selected passages from La Mettrie's works. The medical contexts out of which La Mettrie developed his ideas is certainly of crucial importance. Therefore, a special focus will lie on that author's radical conceptual reassessment of contemporary political and religious discourses on the human body and the soul, with their drastic consequences in philosophical anthropology.
It is a well-known fact that these ideas so radical that not even for the vast majority the most radical philosophers of the French enlightenment (notably Voltaire and D'Holbach) would embrace them openly; even so, the La Mettrie's, like Sades' work was had considerable impact on generations of materialist philosophers to come. In order to encompass this clandestine presence of La Mettrie the seminar will also look into the material conditions of publishing, writing and censorship during the eighteenth century.