La Mettrie’s notorious 1748 treatise argues that the soul is nothing but the working of the body, and that human beings are machines of an unusually complex kind. This edition prints the French text with an English translation, together with The Natural History of the Soul, Frederick the Great’s eulogy of the author, and notes on his place among philosophers.
A founding text of Enlightenment materialism, so scandalous in its day that its author fled to the Prussian court. Download the free EPUB.