Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval


André Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval was a French mathematician and philosopher. He was born in Charenton-le-Pont on 16 February 1716 and died in Berlin on 2 September 1764.
In 1744, he was forced to flee France to Switzerland due to his criticism of Catholic doctrines, accompanied by his student Marie Anne Victoire Pigeon; on 30 June 1746, they married. Prémontval had been raised Roman Catholic, but had spent some time as an atheist and then deist; in Switzerland, Prémontval and his wife converted to Protestantism.
Later they moved to Berlin, where he was admitted to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Prémontval criticised the empiricist theory of the self, arguing that there is a real distinction between an individual's personality and soul that is often ignored, and that our possession of the later is our justification for our interest in the former.

Works