Franklin Fehrman

7 November, 2014
The Thought of LaMettrie, Holbach, & LaPlace
La Mettrie:
Julien Offray de La Mettrie was a French philosopher. He was a materialist and was a part of the
Enlightenment period. Not only was he a materialist, but he was also an atheist. His most important work
was the Lhomme machine, or machine man. His background being what it was, that is, a physician,
he approached the mind-body problem from the completely materialist approach; he believed that thought
or mind was a product of the physical body. He was brought to his conclusions after a bout of fever. He
believed that human thought was an expression or consequence of a highly developed and complex
ordering of the organs that humans possessed. He was also a determinist believing that the human
conception of morality, basing this as it were on his previous belief that the biological makeup of humans
and animals did not represent such a great degree of separation, thus denying some human conventions
when compared to animal behavior, was poorly defined. He was a consummate hedonist and thought that
as humans were a sort of natural machine, that we should always seek what benefits us personally for our
own gain and pleasure, at the sometimes unfortunate consequence to others.
Holbach:
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron dHolbach was a German born philosopher, author and encyclopedist.
Besides his important and extensive work as an encyclopediste, translating many contemporary German
works into French, as well as contributing some 400 articles to the encyclopedic project at the time of
Diderot and DAlembert. Holbach himself was mostly devoted to the cause of the materialist. He wrote a
work against Christianity entitled Christianity Unveiled in 1761 which attacked Christianity as an
impediment towards the advancement of materialism. Following this, he wrote a book entitled System of
Nature which furthered and elaborated on his theme. He pushed some Newtonian and Hobbesian notions

that nothing is more than matter in motion. Though he broke away from both gentlemen when he flat out
denied the use for an appeal to a supernatural authority. Though he pushed for a similar approach to vice
as LaMettrie, he maintained an approach to virtue as well, saying that it was the right thing to make us
happy. Later in his life, he turned toward more socio-political topics. These criticized abuses of power,
prescribed ways of reforming corruption of government and tried to describe alternative moral systems to
the traditional Christian morality.
La Place:
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. His
works were primarily concerned with celestial mechanics and he posited a theory of movement and of the
paths of elliptic as concerned the planets. He determined the attraction of a spheroid on a particle outside
of its interior. He sought to delineate empirical observation of the planets from the mathematics of
astronomical tables. He posited a view of the creation of the universe in which gas contracts into matter.
He reformed classical mechanics and filled in the gaps that parts of Newtons calculus could not
complete. He talked about the potential existence of black holes and he anticipated the existence of
nebulas outside our Milky Way.
His importance in the tradition of philosophy is connected to his label as a French materialist and
also in his regard to God. LaPlaces Demon is in reference to the Cartesian notion of God as an evil
demon. In such, if someone knew the notion of all atoms, how they could be calculated by classical
mechanics, one could present the status of the universe in the past and future. What he was saying, was
that finding this one formula would illuminate in a sort of premonition sort of way. He believed that if
one was to have the complete mathematics of the universe, one wouldnt have to resort to the Newtonian
default to some supernatural hypothesis. Lastly, this understanding of the complete mathematical nature
of the universe, and the model we use to understand it, LaPlace believed could be the model of politics
and moral sciences.

Conclusion:
These three French materialists of the Enlightenment period were instrumental in elevating the
sciences to be at par and at times to destroy any vestiges of appeal to the authority of God. They did it
through philosophy as Holbach had done, medicine, as La Mettrie had done, and lastly, through
mathematics, as La Place had done.