UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

“Diderot and materialist theories of the self”

Identification

Clé publique

radar:r-69b57f74940d335b529ca7022366e879

Auteurs

Charles T. Wolfe

Année déclarée

—

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

COUV

Première détection

2026-11-13T15:29:09.272902+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-13T15:29:09.272902+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Institutions déclarées par la source

Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès · Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse · Equipe de Recherche sur les Rationalités Philosophiques et les Savoirs

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

Early 20th-century critiques of materialism (often assimilated to ‘mechanistic materialism’) frequently emphasized that the materialist conception of the world eradicates any presence of agency, selfhood, intentionality – the features by which a human being, and indeed an animal shows signs that ‘someone is home’, as Daniel Dennett phrased it. According to this critique (which runs roughly from Husserl to Ruyer and Sartre, and onto some versions of post-war anti-naturalism) materialism is at best the facilitator of scientific practice with its quantitative, ‘third-person’ approach to personhood, and at worst a kind of ontological legitimator of dehumanization. As one commentator on Diderot put it, “Materialism as a working philosophy, used as a tool in the scientific investigation of the material universe, is appropriate and highly effective. Intended for the objective analysis and description of the world of externals, it yields disastrous results when applied to the inner, subjective world of human nature, human thought, and human emotions” (Hill 1968, 90). Here the historian of early modern materialism has a word to say, for in contrast to the above views, there were indeed various attempts to bridge the gap between selfhood/agency and the world of Nature and naturalist explanations (and additionally one can see that normative judgments with regard to what constitutes ‘inner life’ versus ‘external nature’ are present also in the ‘scholarly’ mode of writing). I will seek to reconstruct two possible responses to the “disastrous results” challenge, both of which were present in French materialism – notably in Diderot – and are compatible although independent of one another: (1) a weakly Spinozist position in which absolute privacy is denied and the self is presented as belonging to the world of external relations, such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) an ‘animalist’ reconstruction of selfhood as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality, but also, one which builds on the foundation of animal life. As Diderot wrote in response to a manuscript by the Dutch natural philosopher Franz Hemsterhuis, in 1774: “Grant me that the animal can feel. I will take care of the rest” (Diderot 1975,- XXIV, 299).

Identifiants

HAL

halshs-04242985

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Chapitre d’ouvrage

Types déclarés par les sources

COUV

Éditeurs

Eötvös Loránd University Press

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Description bibliographique du livre

Éditeur

Eötvös Loránd University Press

Disponibilité non établie

Sources

HAL · Document 1

• Document · https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04242985v1

Statut documentaire

Pertinence à examiner

Bibliothèque

Cette identité n’est pas encore intégrée à la Bibliothèque juridique.