DESTUTT de TRACY, ANTOINE-LOUIS-CLAUDE. - Politician and philosopher, b. in Paris on 10 June 1754, d. there on 10 March 1836. He adhered to the first stirrings of the French Revolution: in the Constituent Assembly he sat on the left. He was imprisoned under the Terror. He belongs to the anthropocentric current of the 18th-century French sensist school.

Ideology (Éléments d'idéologie, Paris 1801-15, 2nd ed. there 1824-25) is the history of the human intellect considered in relation to its means of knowing; in it he asserts that there are four distinct modes of sensibility into which every one of our psychic facts resolves itself: sensibility properly so called, memory, judgment, and will. Another important work: Commentaire sur l'esprit des lois de Montesquieu (there 1819).

Bibliography4 works

BIBL.: F. Picavet, Les idéologues, Paris 1891, chaps. 5-6; V. Stepanova, D. de T., eine histor. psychol. Studie, dissertation, Zurich 1908; O. Kohler, Die Logik des D. de T., Leipzig 1931; G. Capone-Braga, La filosofia francese e italiana del Settecento, I, 2nd ed., Padua 1941, pp. 242-84.

@incollection{ec4_destutt_de_tracy_antoine_louis, author = {Scola, Alberto}, title = {Destutt de Tracy, antoine-louis-claude}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {IV}, pages = {1491}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1950}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/destutt-de-tracy-antoine-louis-claude} }

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Destutt de Tracy, Antoine-Louis-Claude

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