Matérialisme et unité de l’être humain : le défi du dualisme cartésien chez La Mettrie et d’Holbach

摘要

This paper assesses the infl uence of Descartes’s thought on Julien Offray nde La Mettrie and Baron D’Holbach, two prominent materialist philosophers of the 18 nth ncentury. While both agree on the aberrant and unintelligible character of the soul’s nspirituality, their interpretation of the consequences of Cartesianism differ. To lay the nground for his own materialism, La Mettrie disingenuously describes Descartes as a ncrypto-materialist. D’Holbach, on the other hand, takes the mistake of dualism as the nproduct of an overly imaginative metaphysics.