Book dossier

L'homme machine

by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Bernard A. Laska

Man a Machine (French: L'homme Machine) is a work of materialist philosophy by the 18th-century French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, first published in 1748. In this work, La Mettrie extends Descartes' argument that animals were mere automatons or machines to human beings, denying the existence of the soul as a substance separate from matter.