Materialism and the early modern 'natural history of man'

Abstract

This chapter looks at the use of Epicureanism in early modern attempts to explain the human being in purely naturalistic and material terms, mainly in Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, excluding the moral and political implications of these attempts. After discussing the principal vectors of Epicurean materialism and the difficulties of providing a convincing naturalistic explanation of human beings on Epicurean principles, it looks at how thinkers in the early modern period attempted to solve these problems. The main question concerned the activity of matter, which was linked to discussions of the soul and animal generation. Hence the chapter looks at debates firstly on the properties of atoms, then on human and animal souls, before discussing in more detail the eighteenth-century writers who attempted to provide a purely material explanation of human beings and their use of Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura in particular. We see that Epicurean philosophy was a permanent presence in naturalistic theories, but was normally part of a more eclectic framework. Thinkers took those aspects which corresponded to their aim and combined them with different scientific theories, without necessarily subscribing to the central tenets of Epicureanism. Reference to Epicureanism increasingly functioned as a symbol of the rejection of central Christian doctrines and as a way of proclaiming one’s materialism.