Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714 to 1780) was a French philosopher and Catholic priest who made psychology and the philosophy of mind the centre of his work. Born in Grenoble into a legal family, he took holy orders at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, moved in the circle of Diderot, and was a friend of Rousseau. He became the leading French interpreter of John Locke, but he went further than Locke by deriving all knowledge from sensation alone, a position called sensationalism, and by using the association of ideas as his main principle of explanation. His Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines appeared in 1746, and his most important book, the Traité des sensations of 1754, imagines a statue given one sense at a time to show how the whole mental life could grow out of sensory experience. He served for some years as tutor to the young Duke of Parma, was elected to the Académie française in 1768, and spent his later years in retirement near Beaugency on the Loire.