Bodies, Minds and Social Relations in the Anthropology of the Montpellier School

In the philosophical discussions of early modernity, a concept of ‘mind’ is configured to account not only for the relations between the mental and bodily spheres, but also for intersubjective, sympathetic, and social phenomena. The various and specific contributions from the sphere of medical-philosophical knowledge also play a significant role in the development of this debate. We propose to thematise the issue in the context of the 18th-century tradition of the Montpellier School, beginning, in particular, with the problem of the relationship between the “physique” and the “moral”, the fundamental problematic-conceptual core of the new Montpellier medical anthropology, which emerges especially in Louis de Lacaze’s Idée de l’homme physique et moral (1755) and in Paul-Joseph Barthez’s Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme (1778). Lacaze offers, for instance, interesting reflections on the ways in which animal economy and “action de penser” are modulated differently in the savage context and in the social and political condition (“l’état de société”) producing specific configurations of relationships with others. For his part, Barthez notes that conflict is at the heart of the subjective experience of life: man is constantly torn between reasons and passions and it is sometimes impossible to reconcile the body’s ends with moral and social obligations. It is, therefore, within the tension between the functioning of bodily processes and the principles ordering inter-human relations, that the question of the relationship with others emerges in Barthez.