Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges (1757-1808). French physician and prominent Idéologue. As a professor of clinical medicine and member of the Institut, Cabanis championed improvements in public health; as a member of the Conseil des Cinq-Cents and senator, he supported the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire, but opposed Napoleon's subsequent drift to dictatorship.

His principal work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (1802), elaborates a rigorous psychophysiological materialism. Going beyond the abstractive epistemology of Condillac and the exclusive environmentalism of Helvétius, Cabanis argued that all mental processes were derived from sensation and contingent upon a complex interplay of physical determinants. Though influential for later Positivism [see Comte], Cabanis's medical philosophy and the secular ethic which it proclaimed were stymied by Napoleon's political aims and by the revival of religion and metaphysical idealism in the early 19th c.

[James Shields]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.