LA METTRIE, Julien Offray de.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Oeuvres philosophiques. Early collected edition of the French physician's philosophical works, published posthumously, the first edition published in London and Berlin the previous year. According to Roger Stoddard, the 1752 edition is the "first of the collected works made up of separately signed and paged pieces". It includes L'Homme machine and Traité de L'Ame, two of La Mettrie's best known and most provocative works.This copy is in an attractive French period binding. The gilt tools on the spine - a sequence of small dots, triangles and upward-facing wedges - are distinctive, and quite similar to those classified by Giles Barber in his Catalogue of Printed Books and Bookbindings as PAL 36. Interestingly, these ornaments appear on a binding signed by the "veuve [widow] Le Monnier" (De Ricci, pl. 29), and are therefore sometimes attributed by scholars to an unspecified female member of the prestigious family of Parisian bookbinders Le Monnier. According to Barber, the veuve may be identified with the wife of Thomas LeMonnier, master bookbinder, who died in 1775.An early Enlightenment leader, La Mettrie (1709-1751) fled France and moved to the Dutch Republic after his viciously satirical attacks on conservative Parisian physicians. The publication of the scandalous L'Homme-machine (1747) forced him to flee again, this time to Berlin. "As a philosophical materialist La Mettrie rejected both the vitalism of Georg Ernst Stahl and his followers and the Christian notion, followe

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