Etienne Bonnot de Condillac 1714 – 1780

Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac, was a French Enlightenment philosopher and the principal continental developer of empiricism after Locke. His Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge and Treatise on Sensations developed a thoroughgoing sensationalism in which all human cognition is constructed by the transformation of sense impressions through attention, comparison, and language. The famous statue thought experiment of the Treatise traces the gradual emergence of mental life as one sense after another is awakened. His Logic and Language of Calculation extended the program to a philosophy of language and mathematics.

Etienne Bonnot de Condillac was born in 1714 at Grenoble, the younger son of a magistrate; the philosopher Mably was his elder brother. He took orders and held the title of abbe but never functioned as a parish priest. From around 1740 he frequented the Parisian salons of Madame de Tencin and Madame Geoffrin, formed lifelong friendships with Rousseau and Diderot, and from 1758 to 1767 served as preceptor to the infante of Parma at the court of Don Felipe.

His major works are the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), the Treatise on Systems (1749), the Treatise on Sensations (1754), the Treatise on Animals (1755), the Course of Studies for the Prince of Parma (1769-1773), the late Logic (1780), and the posthumously published Language of Calculations. He was elected to the Academie francaise in 1768 and divided his last years between the abbey of Mureaux and Paris.

Condillac developed Locke's empiricism into a thoroughgoing sensualism: in the famous thought experiment of the Treatise on Sensations he derives all the operations of the human mind from the successive awakening of senses in an initially statue-like figure. He treated the sciences as well-made languages, and his analysis influenced Lavoisier's reform of chemical nomenclature, the ideologues of the Revolution, and the early Marxist tradition. He died at Beaugency in August 1780.