La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709–1751)

French philosopher who put forward an intensely materialistic and atheistic view of the world and humanity. His most important work was L'Homme machine/Man-machine, 1747. His ideas were condemned by the Church, forcing him to emigrate first to Holland, and then to the court of Frederick II of Prussia, where he remained for the rest of his life.

La Mettrie was born at St-Malo, in Brittany. His study and practice of medicine convinced him that psychic phenomena were organic in origin. He expounded this view in 1745, in Histoire naturelle de l'âme/A Natural History of the Soul, the first in a series of controversial publications that denied the presence of any divine element in man.