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Empiricism and Materialism

15.04.2025 · AE550415

Soul increasingly reduced to observable mental or bodily processes.

Locke: denies innate ideas—soul as tabula rasa, a passive receiver.  Start of the NATURE / NURTURE debate.

Hume: rejects a persistent self; mind is a bundle of perceptions.

La Mettrie: human soul is an effect of bodily mechanisms (*L'homme machine*).

Diderot and French materialists view soul as an illusion of matter in motion.

Mind-body dualism increasingly replaced by monist materialism.

12.05.2025 · AE550512

L'homme machine

The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement. Without food, the soul pines away, goes mad, and dies exhausted....
15.04.2025 · AE550415

Associationism

Soul or mind functions through the association of ideas. David Hartley: vibrations in nerves correspond to mental associations. Mind explained through natural laws, not metaph...