Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

Brother of the Abbé de Mably, Condillac was ordained a priest in Paris, frequenting the philosophic salons of Madame Geoffrin and associating with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot. In 1758, the royal court sent him to Parma to serve as tutor to the young Prince Ferdinand of Bourbon-Parma.

In his landmark Traité des sensations (1754), Condillac argued that all human knowledge, memory, imagination, and desires derive solely from sense experience. He imagined a marble statue endowed successively with the five senses, demonstrating how consciousness and intellect blossom from sensory input alone.