Jacob Moleschott

Jacob Moleschott (born in 's-Hertogenbosch, 1822 – died in Rome, 1893) was a Dutch physiologist and philosopher whose name is closely tied to scientific materialism in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy. His central claim was that life and even thought should be explained through physical and chemical processes, without appealing to a vital force separate from matter.

He studied medicine at Heidelberg, where he earned his doctorate in 1845, and then turned to physiology. His early work on nutrition, Physiologie der Nahrungsmittel (1850), brought him attention, but his radical politics and atheism cost him his post at Heidelberg in 1854. After a period without an academic position, he taught physiology in Zurich, Turin and finally Rome, where he died. In Italy he took citizenship, later became a senator, and wrote much of his work in Italian, including Sulla vita umana.

His most widely read book, Der Kreislauf des Lebens (The Cycle of Life), presents matter and its transformations as the basis of all living things. Moleschott argued that thought depends on bodily processes, and his slogans, such as no thought without phosphorus, summed up that conviction. His ideas shaped the nineteenth-century debate on materialism and popular science writing on nutrition and physiology.