Francis Bacon (1561-1626) wished that the means of dominating nature and of contributing to the wellbeing of society were given to science. For Thomas Hobbes (1598-1679) who denied the existence of soul, experiment is the only foundation of any knowledge. John Locke (1632-1704), for which ideas result only from senses, made of experiment the basis of his philosophy. |
La Mettrie (1709-1751) rejected any dualism body / soul. One century after Descartes, he resumed the concept of the "animal-machine" to extend it to human and to describe him as a "man-machine". Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who was one of the most famous materialists before Marx and Engels, stated that there is only matter. This is sufficient for explain everything because it is not inert, but always moving and capable of sensitivity. The philosophers Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771) and Paul-Henri Dietrich baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) also contributed to the development of the materialist thought. |
Initially Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) developed a materialist critic of the speculative thought. "The great fundamental question in philosophy, and especially in modern philosophy, is that of the relation between thought and being." With his anthropomorphic vision of religion ("The Essence of Christianity", 1841), he updated the basic ideas of materialism.
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The progress in knowledge, with the major discoveries like alive cell, electricity, Darwin's theory of evolution, offered to Friedrich Engels (1820-1894) and Karl Marx (1818-1883), influenced by Feuerbach, the opportunity to modernize materialism. Their "dialectical materialism" allowed to explain the social behaviors from the economic organization of society. |