MIND, BODY, AND SOUL: IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Ann Thomson's Bodies of Thought is simultaneously an outgrowth of her prior work and a new direction in her scholarship. She has done rigorous and original study of the mid-eighteenth-century French materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie, offering important critical editions and major articles. She also has done fruitful studies of broader issues of eighteenth-century medicine, vitalism, Epicureanism, and clandestine literature. These endeavors immersed her in precisely the consequences—both intended and unintended, in France, above all—of the sorts of debates that she examines here. She knows well the early modern issues and implications of debates about mind and body, and she can explain them with precision and fluency.