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Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Julien Offray de La Mettrie, 1709-1751, French philosopher and physician.

La Mettrie argued in L'Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745), a materialist work of natural history, the Epicurean notion that the only pleasures are those of the senses. The idea was developed in L'homme machine (Man a Machine, 1748). For his theories he was driven from France to exile in Berlin.