André Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval was a French mathematician and philosopher. He was born in Charenton-le-Pont on 16 February 1716 and died in Berlin on 2 September 1764.[1]

In 1744, he was forced to flee France to Switzerland due to his criticism of Catholic doctrines,[2][3] accompanied by his student Marie Anne Victoire Pigeon; on 30 June 1746, they married.[4] Prémontval had been raised Roman Catholic, but had spent some time as an atheist and then deist; in Switzerland, Prémontval and his wife converted to Protestantism.[5]

Later they moved to Berlin, where he was admitted to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences.[6]

Prémontval criticised the empiricist theory of the self, arguing that there is a real distinction between an individual's personality and soul that is often ignored, and that our possession of the later is our justification for our interest in the former.[7]

Works

  • Cause bizarre ou Pièces d'un procès ecclésiastico-civil, 1755. (Scanned copy at Google Books)
  • Le Diogène de D'Alembert on Pensées libres sur l'Homme, 1755. (Scanned copy at Google Books)
  • Discours sur diverses notions préliminaires à l'étude des mathématiques [Discourse on diverse notions preliminary to the study of mathematics], 1743. (Scanned copy at Google Books)
  • Discours sur la nature des quantités que les mathématiques ont pour objet, 1742. (Scanned copy at Google Books)
  • Discours sur la qualité du nombre, 1743.
  • Discours sur l'utilité des mathématiques, 1742.
  • L'esprit de Fontenelle on Recueil de pensées tirées de ses ouvrages, 1744, 1755, 1767.
  • Le hasard sous l'empire de la Providence, 1754.
  • Lettres contre le dogme de l'eucharistie tel qu'il est enseigné par l'Église romaine adressées en 1735 au fameux P. Tournemine jésuite.
  • Mémoires, 1749.
  • La monogamie ou L'unité dans le mariage, 1751. (Google Books Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3; German translation by Windheim, 1753: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3)
  • Panagiana Panurglca ou Le faux évangélîste, 1750.
  • Pensées sur la liberté, 1750.
  • Préservatifs contre la corruption de la langue française en Allemagne, 1761.
  • Vues philosophiques ou Protestations et déclarations sur les principaux objets des connaissances humaines, 1757, 1761.

References

  1. ↑ Lifschitz, AS; (2009) "Prémontval, André Pierre le Guay". In: Stammerjohann, H, (ed.) Lexicon Grammaticorum: A Bio-Bibliographical Companion to the History of Linguistics. (pp. 1209-1211). Max Niemeyer Verlag: Tübingen. ISBN 978-3-484-73068-7
  2. ↑ Louisa Shea (2010). The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon. JHU Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-8018-9385-8.
  3. ↑ Avi Lifschitz (28 September 2012). Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century. OUP Oxford. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-19-163775-9.
  4. ↑ Lloyd Strickland (28 March 2018). The Philosophical Writings of Prémontval. Lexington Books. p. xv. ISBN 978-1-4985-6357-4.
  5. ↑ Strickland, Lloyd (2018). Proofs of God in Early Modern Europe: An Anthology. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. p. xiv. ISBN 978-1-4813-0931-8. ...André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval, who was, by his own admission, an atheist for a time in his youth before becoming a deist and then converting to an unspecified form of Protestantism at the age of thirty.
  6. ↑ Julia Gasper (11 December 2013). The Marquis d'Argens: A Philosophical Life. Lexington Books. p. 228. ISBN 978-0-7391-8234-5.
  7. ↑ R. R. Palmer (8 December 2015). Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France. Princeton University Press. p. 149. ISBN 978-1-4008-7686-0.


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