The “Subtle” Materialism of August Wilhelm Hupel

The paper deals with the first book-length materialist treatise published in Germany in the 1770s, August Wilhelm Hupel’s Anmerkungen und Zweifel über die gewöhnlichen Lehrsätze vom Wesen der menschlichen und der thierischen Seele. Based on a “great chain of being” conception, he maintains that his materialist doctrine provides stronger grounds for belief in the immortality of the soul than those substance dualism has offered. He seeks to defend that the soul is a composite being, i.e. that it is material, but at the same time he argues that the soul is not identical with the body or parts of it, but rather that it exists independently and composed of “subtle”, ether-like matter. Hupel also argues that the soul is immortal. This claim is particularly uncommon since most materialists, not only in Germany, subscribe to some version of mortalism, i.e. the doctrine that the mind either ceases to exist altogether with the death of the body, or that it remains in a death-like state until the resurrection.