Ann Thomson

Animals, Humans, Machines And Thinking Matter, 1690-1707

This article looks at the debate on the soul in England at the turn of the eighteenth century and at the role played within it by the question of animal soul, which had both theological and scientific ramifications. It discusses the difficulty of accounting for animal behaviour without either adopting the animal-machine hypothesis or according animals an immaterial and hence immortal soul. While those who denied the existence of an immaterial human soul and refused any fundamental distinction between humans and other animals were accused of reducing humans to machines, this article shows that the issues were in fact more complex. The fundamental question was that of the nature of matter; the main danger for many theologians seemed to lie in the attribution of innate life and sensibility to matter, which opened the door to materialism and undermined Christian doctrine

Materialistic Theories of Mind and Brain

The question of eighteenth-century materialism — generally seen as a purely French phenomenon — has given rise to quite a large number of misconceptions, concerning its nature, its philosophical inspiration or its aims, to name but a few. One can even doubt whether such a label, despite being consecrated by usage, has any real meaning, as there are great differences between those who have been included in the group of eighteenth-century French materialists (usually Meslier, La Mettrie, Diderot, Helvetius, d’Holbach), and doubts have even been thrown on how far they can all be classified as ‘materialists, ’ in addition, materialistic ideas are not confined to these particular thinkers, and recent research has been more and more concerned to study lesser-known writers and works. No-one holds any more the misleading, but at one time very common, view which (totally ignoring dates of publication) saw it as a purely late eighteenth-century phenomenon, centred around the Systeme de la Nature, published in 1770, which did, it is true, lead to a great polemical debate and the republication of earlier materialistic works. What I would like to do in this article is not to give a general survey of eighteenth-century French materialism but, in order to throw some light on the relationship between philosophy and science in the case of eighteenth-century materialists, to look at the essential scientific question raised by materialistic thinkers, in particular in the early years of the century, namely the functioning of the brain.

Colonialism, race and slavery in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes

ABSTRACT Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, generally known as the Histoire des deux Indes, one of the best-sellers of the Eighteenth Century, has frequently been characterized as an anticolonial work. This article shows instead its complexity and internal inconsistencies, explained in part by the context and manner of its composition and Raynal’s links to ministerial circles. It studies the work’s description of the African continent and European trade on the West coast and its treatment of explanations for the Africans’ skin colour, as well as Diderot’s famous denunciation of the slave trade, and analyses the changes these passages undergo in the course of the work’s different editions (from 1770 to 1820). By looking beyond Denis Diderot’s impassioned denunciations of the slave trade and of European treatment of extra-European peoples, we gain a better understanding of the complexity of thinking about European expansion and human diversity in the Eighteenth Century.

Questioning Church Doctrine in Private Correspondence in the Eighteenth Century: Jean Bouhier’s Doubts Concerning the Soul

This chapter discusses the exchange of letters, dating from the late 1730s and early 1740s, between Jean Bouhier of the Dijon Parlement and certain Protestant thinkers in Switzerland. In these letters Bouhier expressed heterodox views on the human soul and thinking matter, which were part of a tradition dating from certain Church Fathers. These letters show the influence of English theological debates in the early years of the century, which had been reported in learned periodicals, often by Huguenot exiles. We see that sincere Christians like Bouhier were willing to examine critically in private certain key teachings of the Church in ways which they believed to be consistent with Christian belief. While the inability to hold such discussions publicly in France pushed others into opposition to Christianity, it would be a mistake to assume that such doubts were necessarily proof of irreligious tendencies.

La Mettrie ou les morts de Monsieur Machine

This article, after evoking the hostile fictitious account of La Mettrie’s death in which he is described as a machine, studies first of all how this doctor discussed death in his own works, in particular in Systeme d’Epicure. Here La Mettrie also refers to his own death, claiming that he has no doubt he will die as a philosopher. A study of the diverse accounts of and reactions to his untimely death shortly afterwards lead to the conclusion that he did not perhaps die as he had hoped but that he died as a physician, with no deathbed conversion.