Materialism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought

The eighteenth century was an age of prodigious scientific learning. While the seventeenth century's philosophical milieu was influenced mainly by physics (mechanics and cosmology), the eighteenth century became especially fascinated with chemistry, or the constitution of matter, and by the phenomenon of life and its forms of organization. In this sense, materialist philosophers and scientists were strongly motivated to explain the complexities and diversities of life without reference to divine intervention.

The diversity of life had been unprecedentedly systematized by Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), whose Systema naturae (System of nature) was published in 1735; however, biological diversity was well known long before the eighteenth century, and the discoveries explorers made around the world drew the attention of many scientists. The ideas of evolution and adaptation had begun to gain momentum, championed in different forms by Buffon and by Diderot. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, evolution of species was a concept that, though rejected by most, was part of the scientific debate with the works of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). They both struggled with an account of life and diversity based on adaptation to a changing environment and competition for resources.

Another major scientific figure was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794). Known as the scientist who began the chemical revolution by changing the concept of chemical element and discovering oxygen, which term he coined, Lavoisier developed a new physicochemical nomenclature that stressed the quantitative aspects of combining chemical elements. While Lavoisier was not particularly philosophical, his revisions of the structure of chemical knowledge, and thus of matter theory, brought about a change in the understanding of matter and the mechanisms by which it worked. In this sense, Lavoisier was like many other scientists in the eighteenth century: while maybe not metaphysical materialists themselves, they helped develop a scientific methodological materialism that could support a metaphysical alternative to religion and traditional dualism. Lavoisier, who was a tax collector for the royal government, was guillotined in 1794 during the French Revolution.