MORALS AND HISTORY IN THE MATERIALIST DOCTRINE OF BARON D’HOLBACH

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the possibility of deontological judgments in moral education that Baron d’Holbach proposes in his materialistic system. To this task, the concepts of interest, progress, utility and virtue are reviewed from the point of view of history teaching. It is stated here that the Baron’s idea of moral education is ambiguous because, on the one hand, it must be consistent with “morals of interest” deontological vision (in this perspective, virtue is a natural fact and learning consists in habits regulation according with nature), but on the other hand, history teaching is still teleological, since it presupposes that the political order without religious representations is a future good whose realization depends on the current elucidation of individuals based on the examples from past.