Volume 40, Number 6 · March 25, 1993
A Master Materialist
By Anthony Quinton
La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment
by Kathleen Wellman
Duke University Press, 342 pp., $34.95
More than a few notable philosophers have been doctors. Four that come to mind are Locke, Hartley, Lotze, and William James. Locke's medical services to Lord Shaftesbury got him started on his public career as ideologist-in-chief to the Whigs, who wanted to exclude James II from succeeding his brother Charles II on the throne of England. Hartley was the associationist thinker who was such an object of veneration to Coleridge that the poet named his first son after him. Hermann Lotze was much respected by the British Hegelians of the late nineteenth century, who had all his writings translated. William James's achievement is well known. Aristotle was, like Helvétius and Humphrey Bogart, the son of a fashionable doctor, but not a medical man himself. He was, however, biologically minded, believing that to understand the real nature of anything one must grasp what it is striving to become and asserting the continuity of all varieties of life: vegetable, animal, and human. All of these philosophers, with the exception of Lotze, but including Aristotle, were naturalistic, rather than spiritualistic, Hartley to the point of materialism and Locke approaching it.
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