Concept
French materialism
Overview
French materialism is the name given to a handful of French 18th-century philosophers during the Age of Enlightenment, many of them clustered around the salon of Baron d'Holbach. Although there are important differences between them, all of them were materialists who believed that the world was made up of a single substance, matter, the motions and properties of which could be used to explain all phenomena.
Prominent French materialists of the 18th century include:
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Denis Diderot
Baron d'Holbach
Claude Adrien Helvétius
Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis
Jacques-André Naigeon
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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They maintained that the original materials out of which all objects in the universe are composed being the same, bodies owe their characteristic qualities not to their substance, but to their form. The elements, then, according to the notions of the ancient philosophers, are the first matter arranged into certain distinguishing forms by the efficient cause. That form with which solidity is associated they call…
Hippocrates, The genuine works of Hippocrates, Vol. 1
States what French materialism is.
It was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. A Communism, ascetic, denouncing all the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form of the new teaching. Then came the three great Utopians; Saint Simon, to whom the middle-class movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance; Fourier; and Owen, who in the country where capitalist…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Names French materialism.
In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at present, as a whole, progresses, has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism between materialism and idealism. The French materialists had this conviction, to a fanatical degree, no less than the deists, Voltaire and Rousseau, and made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If anybody ever concentrated his whole life to the enthusiasm for truth and…
Friedrich Engels, Feuerbach
Names French materialism.
Philosophers who discussed French materialism
- Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis
- Michel Onfray
- Baron d'Holbach
- Julien Offray de La Mettrie
- Jacques-André Naigeon
Related ideas
- Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis
- Materialism
- Baron d'Holbach
- Claude Adrien Helvétius
- Age of Enlightenment
- France
- Denis Diderot
- Julien Offray de La Mettrie
- Salon (gathering)
- Jacques-André Naigeon
Place in the tradition
Part of Atheism.