![]() In his theory of the physical world, however, and especially in his doctrine that animals are automata, Descartes’s own system had a mechanistic side to it that was taken up by 18th-century materialists, such as Julien de La Mettrie, the French physician whose appropriately titled L’Homme machine (1747 Man a Machine, applied Descartes’s view about animals to human beings. Descartes’s philosophy was dualistic, making a complete split between mind and matter. Holding that sensations are corporeal motions in the brain, Hobbes skirted, rather than solved, the philosophical problems about consciousness that had been raised by another contemporary, the great French philosopher René Descartes. His contemporary, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, also propounded an atomistic materialism and was a pioneer in trying to work out a mechanistic and physiological psychology. Gassendi was not thoroughgoing in his materialism inasmuch as he accepted on faith the Christian doctrine that people have immortal souls. In putting forward his system as a hypothesis to explain the facts of experience, Gassendi showed that he understood the method characteristic of modern science, and he may well have helped to pave the way for corpuscular hypotheses in physics. Materialism languished throughout the medieval period, but the Epicurean tradition was revived in the first half of the 17th century in the atomistic materialism of the French Roman Catholic philosopher Pierre Gassendi. Democritus thought that the soul consists of smooth, round atoms and that perceptions consist of motions caused in the soul atoms by the atoms in the perceived thing. The view may be contrasted with that of the earlier philosopher Anaxagoras, who thought that when, for example, the bread that a person eats is transformed into human flesh, this must occur because bread itself already contains hidden within itself the characteristics of flesh. The great beauty of atomism was its ability to explain the changes in things as due to changes in the configurations of unchanging atoms. These atoms can be imperceptibly small, and they interact either by impact or by hooking together, depending on their shapes. According to Democritus, the world consists of nothing but atoms (indivisible chunks of matter) in empty space (which he seems to have thought of as an entity in its own right). Leucippus is known only through his influence on Democritus. 580 bce) and some of the other pre-Socratic philosophers have some claims to being regarded as materialists, the materialist tradition in Western philosophy really begins with Leucippus and Democritus, Greek philosophers who were born in the 5th century bce. History of materialism Greek and Roman materialism ![]() SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.COVID-19 Portal While this global health crisis continues to evolve, it can be useful to look to past pandemics to better understand how to respond today.Student Portal Britannica is the ultimate student resource for key school subjects like history, government, literature, and more.Demystified Videos In Demystified, Britannica has all the answers to your burning questions.This Time in History In these videos, find out what happened this month (or any month!) in history.#WTFact Videos In #WTFact Britannica shares some of the most bizarre facts we can find.Britannica Classics Check out these retro videos from Encyclopedia Britannica’s archives.Britannica Explains In these videos, Britannica explains a variety of topics and answers frequently asked questions.
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