In 1744, he was forced to flee France to Switzerland due to his criticism of Catholic doctrines,[2][3] accompanied by his student Marie Anne Victoire Pigeon; on 30 June 1746, they married.[4] 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.[5]
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.[7]
Prémontval’s hypothesis termed "psychocracy" proposed that there is real interaction between the body and soul, but it is an immaterial kind of influence as opposed to a physical kind.[8]
Discours sur diverses notions préliminaires à l'étude des mathématiques [Discourse on diverse notions preliminary to the study of mathematics], 1743. (Scanned copy at Google Books)
Préservatifs contre la corruption de la langue française en Allemagne, 1761.
Vues philosophiques ou Protestations et déclarations sur les principaux objets des connaissances humaines, 1757, 1761.
References
^Lifschitz, AS; (2009) "Prémontval, André Pierre le Guay". In: Stammerjohann, H, (ed.) Lexicon Grammaticorum: A Bio-Bibliographical Companion to the History of Linguistics. (pp. 1209-1211). Max Niemeyer Verlag: Tübingen. ISBN978-3-484-73068-7
^Strickland, Lloyd (2018). Proofs of God in Early Modern Europe: An Anthology. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. p. xiv. ISBN978-1-4813-0931-8. ...André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval, who was, by his own admission, an atheist for a time in his youth before becoming a deist and then converting to an unspecified form of Protestantism at the age of thirty.