Can matter mark the hours? Eighteenth-century vitalist materialism and functional properties.

Eighteenth-century Montpellerian vitalism and contemporaneous French "vitalist" materialism, exemplified by the medical and biological materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot, differ in some essential aspects from some later forms of vitalism that tended to postulate immaterial vital principles or forces. This article examines the arguments defending the existence of vital properties in living organisms presented in the context of eighteenth-century French materialism. These arguments had recourse to technological metaphors and analogies, mainly clockworks, in order to claim that just as machines can have functional properties which its parts do not possess (e.

Memory, imagination and language in eighteenth-century French sensualism.

Most eighteenth-century philosophers tended to attach memory to imagination, thinking that memory basically consists in the reproduction of previously received sensations, which have perhaps only lost some of their vividness. In his Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines (1746) Condillac, however, insists on separating memory and imagination. This is surprising in so far as one would expect him, as a sensualist, to reduce memory to the faculty of reproducing sensations in the manner of Locke and other empiricists.