Sade and the material's soul conception.

• Grant number: 13/20776-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: February 01, 2014
• End date: June 04, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Mauricio de Carvalho Ramos
• Grantee: Clara Carnicero de Castro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 15/09869-5 - A corpuscular fluid? Sade and the material soul tradition, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

The idea of material soul, as Sade develops it, refers to two different philosophical theories. On one side, there is the electric fluid, whose origin dates back to the pneuma from the Stoics. On the other side, the materialist metempsychosis recaptures Epicurean atomism. Regarding the first concept, the eighteenth century was marked by experiments with electricity, understood at that time as an invisible fluid, able to propagate everywhere, inside and outside the organisms. In humans, it circulates inside the nerves in order to connect the brain and the muscles, producing sensations and movement. Contemporaneously, the principles transmitted by Lucretius were spread into clandestine and materialist literature, whose intention was to refute the existence of God as the first cause of the universe and prove the materiality of the soul, so as to explain all bodies transformations by the atoms' perpetual motion. In its materialistic sense, the transmigration, or metempsychosis, would then be the reorganization of the matter under different formats. Our project aims to study how each of these traditions is re-employed by Sade's heroes in their philosophical theories and applied in the romanesque debauchery practice. The purpose is to analyze the material soul conception according to the sadean libertine through the fusion of these two apparently incompatible dogmas.