Ricerc@Sapienza

In The Man Machine (1738) La Mettrie criticizes the received view of Descartes’s portrait as radically devaluing the body in favour of the mind. Descartes’ bête-machine theory, according to La Mettrie, laid the groundwork for medical materialism. In this chapter I will focus on the work of an early Dutch proponent of Cartesian physiology, Hendrik Le Roy (Henricus Regius, 1598-1679), who saw the mental activity and moral character as functions of the human body and the brain. In the Fundamenta physices (1646, retitled Philosophia Naturalis in the 2nd revised and augmented edition, published in 1654), Regius showed how Cartesian medicine, detached from metaphysical dualism, could be practiced as an empirical discipline.