French Materialism Research Articles

Aтеология и критика религии в философии Мишеля Онфре

The article examines the atheological concept of “the most popular French philosopher” Michel Onfray, as well as his criticism of religion. Onfray borrows the term “atheology” from G. Bataille, which he understands as a current of thought that deconstructs theological truths. The philosopher identifies three original tasks of atheology: the deconstruction of monotheism, the demythologization of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, and the deconstruction of theocracy. He implements all these three tasks in one way or another. The article demonstrates that Onfray’s concept of atheology does not represent something radically new or significantly different from the existing tradition of religion critique. Onfray limits himself to the three monotheisms that have the greatest political influence and resolutely condemns almost all aspects of the three religions. We note that in doing so, Onfray simplifies the image of religion, presenting it exclusively in a negative light. Such negativism brings Onfray closer not only to contemporary new atheists, especially C. Hitchens, who believes that “religion poisons everything”, but also to such representatives of French materialism as Holbach and La Mettrie. Onfray’s approach seems abstract because it does not provide a thorough socio-historical explanation of monotheistic religions. It is shown that his criticism of religion is based on a significant philosophical tradition that goes from Democritus, Lucretius, Epicurus, to Freud, Marx, and Nie­tzsche, and includes French materialists such as Holbach, La Mettrie, Helvetius. His hedonism is more likely to be drawn from the Cyrenaics than from Epicurus. The originality of Onfray’s approach lies in the fact that he incorporates materialism and hedonism into his concept of “philosophy of nature”. Onfray’s positive agenda, although resonant with a number of contemporary issues, is formulated in extremely general terms and is poorly worked out

Материалистическая философия Мишеля Онфре

The article examines the atheological concept of “the most popular French philosopher” Michel Onfray, as well as his criticism of religion. Onfray borrows the term “atheology” from G. Bataille, which he understands as a current of thought that deconstructs theological truths. The philosopher identifies three original tasks of atheology: the deconstruction of monotheism, the demythologization of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, and the deconstruction of theocracy. He implements all these three tasks in one way or another. The article demonstrates that Onfray’s concept of atheology does not represent something radically new or significantly different from the existing tradition of religion critique. Onfray limits himself to the three monotheisms that have the greatest political influence and resolutely condemns almost all aspects of the three religions. We note that in doing so, Onfray simplifies the image of religion, presenting it exclusively in a negative light. Such negativism brings Onfray closer not only to contemporary new atheists, especially C. Hitchens, who believes that “religion poisons everything”, but also to such representatives of French materialism as Holbach and La Mettrie. Onfray’s approach seems abstract because it does not provide a thorough socio-historical explanation of monotheistic religions. It is shown that his criticism of religion is based on a significant philosophical tradition that goes from Democritus, Lucretius, Epicurus, to Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, and includes French materialists such as Holbach, La Mettrie, Helvetius. His hedonism is more likely to be drawn from the Cyrenaics than from Epicurus. The originality of Onfray’s approach lies in the fact that he incorporates materialism and hedonism into his concept of “philosophy of nature”. Onfray’s positive agenda, although resonant with a number of contemporary issues, is formulated in extremely general terms and is poorly worked out.

A French Materialist and Decolonial Perspective on Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today

This short commentary is part of a book symposium about Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism, edited by Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel. It discusses certain chapters from a French materialist lesbian feminist perspective, as well as from a decolonial feminist perspective. Introducing Colette Guillaumin’s sexage proposal and referring to Monique Wittig’s analysis of the heterosexualization of women and of the “straight mind,” the essay recalls the importance of Black feminists in the United States and elsewhere and proposes a theory of the interlocking social-structural relations of sex, race, and class as complementary elements moving toward a renewal of Marxist-feminist reflections from a historical perspective that also accounts for the colonial roots of today’s discussions on care and reproductive labor.

Domestic service and prostitution: Empirical and theoretical connections

Various activities are systematically imposed on women in both paid and unpaid forms, generally involving care for others, sexual activity, or a combination of both. These activities have typically been studied separately, but these analytical divisions are increasingly being questioned. This article contributes to this debate by exploring empirical and theoretical connections two of the most prominent of these activities, prostitution and domestic service. Through a survey of the empirical literature on migration for domestic service, the article identifies four themes that suggest why some migrant women move between domestic service and prostitution: pre-existing structural constraints, migration conditions, working conditions, and migration policies. Subsequently, drawing on the work of French materialist feminists Colette Guillaumin and Paola Tabet and political theorist Carole Pateman, it sketches the outline of a theoretical account of the relationship between these two activities.

Denaturalizzare il sesso. Nicole-Claude Mathieu e l’analisi antropologica delle classi di sesso

This essay presents some of the main contributions of Nicole-Claude Mathieu’s work to anthropology and feminist theory. The first section is devoted to framing Mathieu’s production within French materialist feminism. The ethnologist repeatedly recalls how the forms of oppression experienced by women as a minority group in social relations of sex and the struggles that ensue underlie the epistemological transformations that invest disciplinary knowledge from a feminist perspective. Next, the article addresses the three different ways of conceptualising the relationship between sex and gender and the introduction of the category of social sex to denaturalize sex, understood as a political category. Its analysis is thus compared with some of the contributions of decolonial feminism regarding the category of gender. Just as in her study of the category of sex, we also find in the analysis of androcentrism in anthropology her ability to question the dominant frameworks of ethnological thought. In particular, Mathieu delves into the relationship between androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and naturalism to understand not only how they operate distortions in the production of ethnographic and ethnological knowledge, but also how they define the framework within which to define the relationship between Western “us” and non-Western “others” in reference to social relations of sex.

Towards an “Aesthetics of Weather”: Gustaf Fröding and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

ABSTRACT In spring 1892 the Stockholm literary magazine Ord och bild commissioned Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding (1860–1911) with a translation of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816). At the time, Fröding was an accomplished poet and an experienced translator of Romantic poetry from English, German, and French. However, Fröding lamented in a letter to his editor that in “Hymn” he had encountered an unexpected problem with rendering Shelley’s poetry of meteorological form into Swedish. This is peculiar as Fröding’s own poetic compositions, original and translations alike, are deeply preoccupied with meteorology. Taking its outset in Fröding’s struggle with the translation, this essay investigates weather in “Hymn,” arguing that what had puzzled Fröding was a mode of meteorological representation idiosyncratic to Shelley. The essay suggests that it is precisely through these idiosyncratic meteorological representations that Shelley develops discourses of French materialist and British skeptical and empirical philosophy. This development culminates in an “aesthetics of weather,” expressive of Shelley’s radical conceptions of the social and physical world. The essay concludes that Fröding’s pronounced struggle and the variation in semantic content of his version of the poem reveal what is really the meteorologically precise poetic form of an aesthetics of weather in “Hymn.”

Clinamen, necessity and modern receptions of epicureanism:

Early modern readings of Epicureanism carried various prejudices and the term epicurean often designated an impious and potentially dangerous thinker. This was the case for Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose contemporaries compared his doctrine to Epicureanism on several occasions. However, how accurate would it be to affirm that Spinoza’s philosophy belongs to the neo-epicurean tradition? We find such a comparison in many 17th and 18th century texts, especially in works written by critics of his thought, such as François Fénelon or Jean La Placette. Epicurean doctrine on chance was compared to Spinoza’s theory on necessity, but despite the prejudices of the comparison, both Epicurus’s and Spinoza’s philosophies had an important influence on the Enlightenment, namely on French materialists. In our paper, we proceed to an analysis of this comparison and shed light on one of the most influential receptions of Epicurus’s philosophy in modernity. In this perspective, we show their inherent relation and focus more particularly on their modal theories; we thus examine the reasons why- contrary to other cases- the comparison was based less on ethical and mostly on metaphysical matters and we show at what extent it is legitimate.

Проблемы исследования синестезии: теория и практика

Onsideration of a problem is based on the analysis of the diverse data devoted to the description of historical aspect of formation of scientific knowledge about structure of musical endowments and a concept of a sinesteziya. In the course of research the sinesteziya in which the most significant trends of formation of complete idea of all semantic measurements of this phenomenon are defined is given the analysis of various approaches to definition of the term. Some of the most ancient mentions of a sinesteziya can be considered mentions in philosophy of the East and Ancient Greece. In particular, in ethic and religious exercises of India and China there is an idea of communication of body of knowledge with qualities of an object of knowledge. Philosophers sensationalists made a powerful contribution to understanding of interaction of elements of a perceptual system of the person. D. Yum's concept with enthusiasm was apprehended by the philosopher -the educator I.G. Herder (1778) who considered that by means of one body of perception it is impossible to penetrate into a phenomenon essence. The French materialist E.B. de Condiliac in “The treatise about feelings” (1754), resorting to D. Yum's ideas and developing them, asks a question of the general nature of all feelings and indissoluble communication between them. Sinesteziya is considered as the concept reflecting a form of perception, communication between feelings in mentality, results of their manifestations in the concrete fields of art. In modern science classification of the touch sphere is defined by division of feelings into five modalities: touch, taste, sense of smell, hearing and sight. According to given classifications today several forms of a sinesteziya are revealed: acoustical, flavoring, color, each of which received the name according to the nature of the arising additional feelings. Information of the detailed analysis of researches of a definition of a concept a sinesteziya is provided. The structure of a periodic system of arts and intersensual associations developed by B. Galeyev is analyzed. Initial position of a system is division of arts according to polar signs “visual - acoustical”, “graphic - expressive”. In the center of a system there is an indivisible syncretic art as the beginning in genesis of arts. In the course of specialization of art activity there is a division of arts into music (1), an architecture/ornament (2), a paint-ing/sculpture (3) and art of word (4). The description of sinestetichesky methodology in the context of musicology of the Novosibirsk scientist N. Kolyadenko is submitted. The scientific base of concepts of the author studying the mental mechanism of intersensual associations is considered; a sinestetichnost as “the system property of nonverbal art thinking determined by existence in it of intermodal associations”, and the associative sinestetichesky mechanism which fills with polymodal power formation of pointless images in music and adjacent arts. The scheme of patrimonial modification of arts and the sinestetichesky interpretation of meanings developed by the author which is carried out at three levels of the musical text is analyzed (phonic, composite and intonational). Consideration of the sequence of the offered material on formation of a concept of a sinesteziya will allow to track fully further interrelation them with an art sinesteziya.

A Pioneering Study of Indian Science Fiction

163 BOOKS IN REVIEW sixth chapter extends this work on cinema to examine the 1956 and 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers films. The authors surprisingly but compellingly recontextualize plant horror as a little less horrific, showing how the genre “responds to the longer speculative tradition we outline in this book, one that aims at animating the plant—first by revealing that its mechanisms are compatible with those of the universe, then by attributing a vitality to them that cannot be fully assimilated into animal models of life, and later by uncovering the ways in which they usher humans into a new spatio-temporal reality” (146). As with Poe, Meeker and Szabari demonstrate how in the films vegetality “both invades and structures human consciousness” (146) in ways that counterintuitively might be understood as both “terrifying and appealing” (155). The final chapter, “Becoming Plant Nonetheless,” asks what radical botany might have to offer us in the twenty-first century, “as a politically oriented materialism that has long acted to generate speculative fictions” (178). Sf scholars will naturally find this chapter the most directly relevant to the field, as the authors explore “the nonnormative possibilities inherent in vegetal modes of being” in household names such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Jeff VanderMeer (174). Most of this chapter, which concludes the book somewhat abruptly with no separate conclusion, uncovers the vegetality at the center of the SOUTHERN REACH trilogy (2014), again emphasizing how even unsettling weird fiction can gesture to the “transformative potential of the plant for humans” (191), plant horror serving as “part of a posthuman project” (200). Meeker and Szabari conclude that “The greatest force of radical botany today may lie in its ability to help us imagine, think, and visualize ways of disassembling our socially and historically located subjectivities to open them up to forms of speculation that are both local and cosmic” (177-78). Radical Botany is a remarkable and remarkably readable book, the kind we can really only fault—and perhaps unfairly—for what it does not cover. For example, when the authors refer to the writings of botanists Francis Hallé and Hope Jahren, one wonders what has been lost in the omission of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s comparable work, and indeed any other Indigenous perspectives on the plant. So too do the authors speak of a “global vegetal turn” (88) and how the plant body “circulates transatlantically and transnationally” (3), but with the exception of three pages on Han Kang, the authors and intellectual traditions considered here remain overwhelmingly European and American. Even so, the scope of Radical Botany proves remarkably ambitious for its comparative brevity, documenting both a specific “current in French materialist thought” (3) and gesturing toward a grander tradition of speculative plant fiction around the globe.—Timothy S. Miller, Florida Atlantic University. A Pioneering Study of Indian Science Fiction. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee. Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India. Liverpool UP, 2020. xi+192 pp. $120 hc. 164 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) The year 2020 is turning out to be an important one for scholarship in English on Indian science fiction (sf). Two books, Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers, and my own Indian Science Fiction, have been published on the topic, and a third by Sami Ahmad Khan is in the works. There was none before. Consequently, Final Frontiers, along with these other works, makes important contributions to the quickly expanding field of global sf studies—especially in the field of sf coming out of the developing world. Final Frontiers, however, is distinguishable not only for its pioneering quality, but also because of its outstanding examination of the topic: the relationship between technoscience and sf in India in the middle of the twentieth century. Critical works on Indian sf have been increasing over the last ten to fifteen years. The number of critical essays on Indian sf has steadily grown in many leading academic journals (such as Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Extrapolation, Foundation, South Asian Popular Culture) and anthologies (such as Hoagland and Sarwal’s Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World [2010], Lavender’s Dis-Orienting Planets [2017], and Chattopadhyay, Mandhwani, and Maity’s...

The genesis of Western European sociological thought in the works of G. V. Plekhanov

The article presents the results of the analysis by G.V.Plekhanov of the genesis of Western European sociological thought based on the consideration of the social ideas of the French materialists of the 18th century, the rudiments in their philosophical systems of the historical approach to the study of society and understanding the causes of social inequality and injustice as well as overcoming them. The sources and content of the philosophical and historical theories of the French historians of the Restoration period are revealed, those who recognized the struggle of classes as the cornerstone of the social, political and mental development of European society, including the interpretation of the concept of “social environment” as a set of economic relations of classes, which was a contribution to the history of sociology. The analysis of the sociological views of utopian socialists and representatives of German classical philosophy is conducted. It was revealed that a significant contribution to the development of the theory of society were the ideas of social progress and the creation of a new social science that served the cause of social organization, developed by the utopian socialists, as well as the statement that the future of society is decided in the sphere of social and economic relations, and not political and legal ones. It is emphasized that Hegel’s application of dialectics to the analysis of social changes meant undoubted progress in the development of sociological thought, which consisted in the advancement of the idea of the regularity of the social process. The methodological basis of the author’s study of the problem of the genesis of Western European sociological thought in the works of G.V.Plekhanov is made up of dialectical-materialistic and comparative-historical methods, as well as the method of textological analysis and historical-philosophical reconstruction.

Prawo naturalne w ramach radykalnego oświecenia

The main difference between classical (both ancient and medieval) and modern concepts of natural law lies in the assumption of its supernatural (divine) foundation. Early modern philosophical concepts tend to undermine and gradually to deny God or some other metaphysical entity as the source of natural law. Some contemporary scholars (e.g. Habermas, Bobbio) define this process as transition (modernization, rationalization, Positivisierung) of traditional natural law towards the idea of natural rights and human rights. We can distinguish at least three main schools of natural law during the 17th and 18th centuries, each one more radical than the others: de Groot dares to consider the natural law “as if there were no God”. The philosophers of early Enlightenment (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire) were perhaps more daring, nevertheless they were all deists and the “Supreme Being” still validates natural law in their writings. The article aims to examine the most radical view on natural law, i.e. partly forgotten and underestimated ideas of French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet. For they were all thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (J. Israel), all of them were materialists and atheists, and they perceived the nature and natural law as completely separated from God or other supernatural being. Unlike their older colleagues, these radical philosophers demanded equality (for women and ethnical minorities as well), emancipation, and social justice for all classes. This papers describes the idea of natural law within the radical Enlightenment movement,and investigates some political consequences of this interpretation during the French Revolution. While strongly materialistic, progressive, and atheist, the ideas of Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet were also perceived as politically dangerous. All revolutionary attempts to put these ideas into political and social practice have failed. Finally, these ideas were refuted, but they returned during the 19th- and 20th-century debates on human rights.

Yeniçağ’daki Spiritüel Cevher Anlayışına De La Mettrie’nin İtirazı

Yeniçağ felsefesinde spiritüel cevher, Descartes gibi düalist ya da Berkeley gibi immateryalist filozoflar tarafından savunulduğu kadar, maddî dünyanın mevcudiyetini kerhen tasdik eden Leibniz ve Malebranche gibi filozoflarca da savunulmuş bir görüştür. Düalistler nezdinde fiziksel-maddî cevher ile birlikte mevcut, ama mahiyeti bakımından ondan kökten farklı addedilen; Leibniz ile Malebranche içinse “fiziksel” denen fenomenlerin dayanağı olan spiritüel bir substratum faraziyesi, Hıristiyanlığın resmî öğretisine uygun düşmesi itibariyle çok sayıda taraftar bulmuştur. Böylece, düşünme, hissetme, irade gibi yetilere sahip ve uzamlı olmayan spiritüel cevher, söz konusu yetilerden yoksun ve uzamlı maddî cevher karşısında yüceltilmiş ve kutsanmıştır. Bu anlayış, düşünce tarihinin farklı dönemlerinde olduğu gibi, anti-tezine eleştirel hareket noktası sağlamıştır ve böylece yegâne cevherin maddî olduğunu savunan bir grup Yeniçağ filozofu sahneye çıkmıştır. Hobbes ve Locke gibi dinibütün görünen materyalistlerden bir asır sonra, Aydınlanma döneminde çok sayıda filozof dinsel dogmaların insan aklının önünde engel teşkil ettiğini savunarak materyalist ve ateist bir tavır takınacaktır. Makalemizde, “Fransız materyalistleri” diye anılanların öncüsü De La Mettrie’nin spiritüel cevhere itirazını inceledik. De La Mettrie “ruh” adlandırmasının, hakkında hiçbir ideaya sahip bulunmadığımız boş bir terimden ibaret olduğunu savunur. Ona göre bizlerdeki düşünen kısmı kastetmek üzere kullanılan bu sözümona “ruh”a atfedilen bütün yetiler de aslında beynin ve bedenin organlaşmasına tâbidir. Dolayısıyla da duyumsayan varlık neticede, düalistlerin ve spiritüalist monistlerin savunduğunun aksine, organlaşmış maddedir. Böylece madde, De La Mettrie’nin nezdinde var olan tek cevherdir.

Apropiación de las Damas. El matrimonio, la maternidad y la familia, engranajes básicos del régimen heterosexual

En este artículo, la autora analiza el discurso heterosexual presente en los periódicos El Tiempo y El Espectador, entre 1920 y 1925, periodo clave en la emergencia del proceso de modernización en Colombia. La información recopilada fue abordada mediante el análisis crítico del discurso, a la luz del feminismo materialista francés, el feminismo poscolonial, el lesbofeminismo y la teórica crítica descolonial. Los hallazgos proponen que la prensa escrita fue un medio central para legitimar el régimen heterosexual, al promover la apropiación material y subjetiva de las mujeres por parte de los hombres.

Hybridised materialisms: The ‘twists and turns’ of materialities in feminist theory

This article examines the conceptualisation of materialities in feminist theory through two paradigmatic examples: (French) materialist feminism and new materialisms. What can be interpreted as an opposition between different paradigms can also be disrupted as long as we define what matters as a relation or a process rather than a substance or a lost paradise to which we should return. New materialisms indeed help to investigate aspects such as corporeality, human/non-human interaction and textures, but the role of feminist materialism is invaluable in highlighting the social structures of power relations; more than ever, it makes a decisive contribution to the understanding of domination, such as the social relations and hierarchies implied in femosecularism conceptualised in this article. Ultimately, the tool of hybridised materialisms aims to articulate the theoretical perspective of materialist feminism with that of the new materialisms – in order to avoid the binarism between materiality and culture.

La acción colectiva feminista ¿De la lucha de clases a la lucha de géneros? Aportes para la comprensión práctica de los movimientos sociales: el caso Ni Una Menos

En este artículo me propongo elaborar una explicación factible de los movimientos sociales contemporáneos considerando la acción colectiva feminista del caso argentino “Ni Una Menos” y cuatro componentes visibles en ella: el estructural, el político, el estratégico y el cultural. Para ello incorporo algunas perspectivas de las diferentes teorías de la movilización social; repaso los postulados centrales del feminismo materialista francés, la teoría queer y el feminismo decolonial; y reflexiono sobre las estrategias de la movilización, los repertorios de acción y los marcos de la movilización,haciendo énfasis en las gramáticas de la vida pública que se implementan en estos últimos. El texto presentado tiene por objetivo reforzar el vínculo entre la comprensión y práctica de la protesta social.

Sekularizacija države - pojam, uzroci i posledice

Secularization implies a relationship between the state and religion, where the religion is completely separate from public authority and represents a private matter of individuals. The notion of secularization (saecularizatio) was first used after the peace negotiations in Westphalia, when the French representative referred to this term to indicate the transition from ecclesiastic to civilian control. There are different understandings of the notion of secularization, including the view that it is a practical philosophy for people with the goal of organizing a life without seeking consolation in the supernatural (G.J. Holyoake), the understanding that secularization is the foundation of Christian faith, and that it must be demanded and incited in all areas of life (Dietrich Bonhofer and Friedrich Gogarten), the opinion (Mircea Eliade) that secularization has enabled sensational discoveries of physics, chemistry, results in cybernetics and informatics, as well as the standpoint that secularization is in relation with the modern consumer society. Secularization is easier to achieve in societies where there is a religious heteroge­neity than in states where there is a high degree of religious homogeneity. All forms of political organization in the Middle Ages were of theocratic nature, because it was considered that the government was in charge of governing the state by the grace of God. However, after a while, the idea that any power was given by God began to be questioned. The beginnings of this idea in France were materialized through the advocacy of French materialists while, in Germany, they were stated in the renowned Erfurt program. In the contemporary society, secularization must not be reduced to suppression or (let alone) the abolition of religion. On the other hand, sacralization must not be pursued at the expense of the effective functioning of the civilian government.

Intersectionality beyond feminism? Some methodological and epistemological considerations for research

ABSTRACTThis article aims to extend the discussions that confront the intersectionality of Black American feminists to the ‘consubstantiality of social relations’ espoused by French materialist feminists. It proposes to do so by moving away from this ‘geo-cultural’ territory in order to better anchor the reflection in an epistemological and methodological ground. In order to do this, the article begins with some contributions and controversies of the intersectional approach to the renewal of feminist theories, and then addresses the issues that this renewal raises to the approach of consubstantiality. It then situates the approaches of intersectionality and of consubstantiality on the same epistemological continuum to discuss the middle way unlocked by the intersectionality of Black feminists. Finally, the effects of knowledge of this third way are examined.

D’Holbach on self-esteem and the moral economy of oppression

ABSTRACTRecently, the idea that our desire for the esteem of others could function as a regulative principle of social life has been criticized because the economy of esteem could reinforce oppressive structures due to expressions of mutual esteem within oppressing groups with deviant group norms. This article discusses this problem from a historical point of view, focusing on the moral and political writings of the eighteenth-century French materialist Paul Thiry d’Holbach. D’Holbach’s thoughts are relevant in two respects: (1) For situations of extreme power and wealth differences within oppressing groups, he shows that the economy of esteem does not work in favour of the members of these groups. This is so because the conditions of esteem and self-esteem of the members with lower hierarchical standing tend to be precarious, while the members with higher standing cannot use the flatteries of their inferiors as credible sources of esteem. (2) D’Holbach concedes that self-esteem could be stabilized by refraining from self-reflection but argues that such a strategy comes at the price of an impaired capacity for protecting one’s natural needs. The upshot of his considerations is that our interest in esteem and self-esteem provides strong pragmatic and moral reasons for opposing oppression.

Materialism and ‘the soft substance of the brain’: Diderot and plasticity

ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that any self-respecting materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain–mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows for a more culturally sedimented sense of the brain, which he described in his late Elements of Physiology as a ‘book – except it is a book which reads itself’. Diderot thus provides a lesson for materialism as it reflects on the status of the brain, science and culture.

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

SummaryThis article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.