ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the reception of Condillac’s philosophy in French materialists’ texts around 1750. It focuses on La Mettrie, Diderot, and Deschamp’s responses to the publication of the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. The aim of this analysis is to show that Condillac’s theory of mind was instrumental in the establishment of materialism, as it allowed the defenders of this position to present their approach as a solution to Condillac’s idealist predicament. My argument proceeds in three steps: I will first show that Diderot was responsible for creating the problem of how to justify the existence of an extra-mental reality; he did so by presenting Condillac as an idealist in the Promenade du sceptique (1747) and the Lettre sur les aveugles (1749). The chapter then turns to La Mettrie and Deschamps. While the former sought to subvert Condillac’s gnoseology by demonstrating that sensation implies an external cause, the second fundamentally reconceptualized sensation by conceiving of it as requiring two parts that inhabit the same realm.
