LAROMIGUIÈRE, PIERRE
(1756–1837)

Pierre Laromiguière, the French professor of philosophy, was born at Livignac in the district of Rouergue. As a young man, he was ordained a priest and exercised his ecclesiastical duties for a short period before becoming professor of philosophy successively at Carcassonne, Tarbes, Toulouse, and the Sorbonne. He was a close student of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and an associate of the Idéologues but departed from the teachings of both in certain particulars. Excessively shy, he refused to propose his candidacy to the French Academy, though twice urged to do so, and confined his public appearances to the classroom. He died in Paris, one of the most esteemed and beloved of teachers. Among his more famous pupils were Victor Cousin and Théodore Jouffroy.

Laromiguière's disagreement with the school of Condillac arose over the question of the mind's passivity. He argued that if all our ideas were modifications of sensory material impressed upon us by external causes, it would be impossible to account for attention, comparison, and reason. These, he held, were essentially active. There is a fundamental distinction to be made, he said, between seeing and looking, listening and hearing, and the difference cannot be explained if the soul is a passive recipient of sensory stimuli. Activity was indefinable for Laromiguière, since it had no anterior ideas from which it could be derived. He seemed to believe that anyone hearing the term would grasp its meaning.

The three activities of the understanding were attention, comparison, and reasoning; and the three activities of the will corresponding to them were desire, preference, and freedom—the latter being the power to act or not to act. Laromiguière's insistence on the soul's activity was most welcome to his contemporaries, for it restored to men the autonomy that, they felt, Condillac had destroyed. While disagreeing with Condillac on this point, Laromiguière agreed with his predecessor that the primary business of philosophy was the analysis of ideas. In his best known and extremely popular work, Leçons de philosophie, which ran through six editions between 1815 and 1844, he assigned to metaphysics the single task of discovering the origin of all our ideas.

Laromiguière was particularly admired for the perfection of his literary style, the fame of which was acknowledged even by Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine.

See also Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de; Cousin, Victor; French Philosophy; Ideas; Jouffroy, Théodore Simon; Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe.

Bibliography

works by laromiguière

Projet d'éléments de métaphysique. Toulouse, 1793.

Sur les paradoxes de Condillac. Paris, 1805.

Leçons de philosophie sur les principes de l'intelligence. Paris, 1815–1818.

works on laromiguière

Boas, George. French Philosophies of the Romantic Period, 33–42. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1925.

Janet, Paul. "Laromiguière, la liberté de penser." Revue philosophique et littéraire 1 (1848): 253–263, 358–368.

Picavet, François. Les idéologues, 520–548, 552–567. Paris: Alcan, 1891. Second section referred to deals with Laromiguière's influence.

Taine, Hippolyte. Les philosophes classiques du XIXe siècle en France. Paris: Hachette, 1868. Ch. 1.

George Boas (1967)