Diderot’s Vital Materialism

Abstract

In what follows I examine Diderot’s chemically influenced vital materialism. Once condemned as “mechanistic,” materialism has had something of a renaissance in recent decades as scholars have rediscovered a tradition of “vital materialism” which they have opposed to older, cruder forms of the idea, e.g. materialisms full of life, affect, chimiatry, and transformation. Sometimes these rediscoveries have attached themselves to a figure of the past, like Margaret Cavendish’s metaphysics of active matter, or to a construct of the still-emerging future, like Karen Barad’s quantum physics-nourished “agential realism” present in all of matter. Another question concerns the extent to which these revivals of “vital” or “active-matter” materialism should be traced back to older Renaissance naturalisms. In what follows, I return to Diderot and the question of his “vital materialism.” Diderot draws both on older traditions, approvingly citing Van Helmont and gesturing towards a new chemistry of living matter and also speaks the language of scientific revolution, writing that “We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences.” In earlier work I sought to connect this language of revolution in the sciences to the emergence of biology as a science. Here I focus on his chemically charged materialism.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Carmen Schmechel for the invitation to write this paper and for her helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Charles Wolfe, “Materialism,” in Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Aaron V. Garrett (London: Routledge, 2014), 90–117; Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016); Lire le matérialisme (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2020); Falk Wunderlich, “Varieties of Early Modern Materialism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24, no. 5 (2016): 797–813, and see in general the special issue to which Wunderlich’s paper is an introduction.

2 Charles T. Wolfe, “Materialism New and Old,” Antropología Experimental 17 (2017): 215–24; revised version in Wolfe, Lire le matérialisme.

3 Deborah Boyle, The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); David Cunning, Cavendish (London: Routledge, 2016). For a fascinating critique of this way of labelling Cavendish, see Laura Georgescu, “Cavendish on life,” in “The Life of Matter: From Early Modern Vital Matter Theories to Enlightenment Vitalism,” ed. Charles T. Wolfe, special issue, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 77, no. 4 (2023), http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0005.

4 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–31; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–43.

5 Daniel Garber, “Margaret Cavendish among the Baconians,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 9, no. 2 (2020): 53–84; Guido Giglioni, “Active Matter: A Philosophical Aberration or a Very Old Belief?,” in Conserving Active Matter: Cultural Histories of the Material World, ed. P.N. Miller and S.K. Poh (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022), 164–85. See also the essays in The Life of Matter: From Early Modern Vital Matter Theories to Enlightenment Vitalism, ed. Charles T. Wolfe, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 77, no. 4 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0005.

6 D. Diderot, Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, (1753; revised 1754), in Diderot, Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Dieckmann, J. Proust, and J. Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1975–) (hereafter DPV), vol. 9, 30–31. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

7 Charles T. Wolfe, “Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot’s Biological Project,” in The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E.H. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 181–201.

8 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (London: Heinemann, 1984).

9 Diderot, “Beau,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des arts et des métiers, ed. D. Diderot & J. D’Alembert, 35 vols. (Paris: Briasson, 1751–) (hereafter Enc.), vol. 2, 181b.

10 Diderot, Observations sur Hemsterhuis, DPV, vol. 24, 251.

11 Lettre sur les sourds et muets, “Lettre à Mademoiselle —,” DPV, vol. 4, 197.

12 Locke speaks of the blind person as having been: “taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t'other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere,” see John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II.ix.8. See Mark Paterson, Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and Paterson, “The Molyneux Problem,” in Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, ed. Dana Jalobeanu and Charles T. Wolfe (Cham: Springer, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31069-5_317

13 Lettre sur les sourds et muets, DPV, vol. 4, 140.

14 Lettre sur les aveugles, DPV, vol. 4, 44.

15 Timothy Lenoir, “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology,” Isis 71 (1980): 77–108 and for useful critical commentary, John Zammito, “The Lenoir Thesis Revisited: Blumenbach and Kant,” Stud. Hist. Philos. Biol. Biomed. Sci. 43, no. 1 (2012): 120–32.

16 Boyle, The Well-Ordered Universe; Cunning, Cavendish. I find Julia Borcherding’s approach more convincing, see e.g.her essay “A Most Subtle Matter: The (Im)materialisms of Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish,” in The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism, ed. Joshua Farris and Benedikt Paul Göcke (London: Routledge, 2022), 148–66. Catherine Wilson provides a good, more contextually sensitive discussion of vital materialism which she (untraditionally) applies to Hume, see Catherine Wilson “Hume and Vital Materialism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24, no. 5 (2016): 1002–21.

17 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

18 Charles T. Wolfe, “Forms of Materialist Embodiment,” in Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge 1500–1850, ed. M. Landers and B. Muñoz (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 129–44.

19 Timo Kaitaro, Diderot’s Holism: Philosophical Anti-Reductionism and Its Medical Background (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997). I’ve briefly discussed Kaitaro’s view and the balance between more holistic and more reduction-friendly readings of Diderot in Charles T. Wolfe, “Aggregate and Identity: Diderot's Approach,” in “Genealogie filosofiche dell’identità moderna: tra biologia, etica e politica,” special issue, Paradigmi 40, no. 3 (2022): 475–86.

20 Letter to Damilaville, November 1760, in Correspondance, éd. G. Roth and J. Varloot, 16 vols. (Paris: Minuit, 1957), vol. 3, 216.

21 Rhoda Rappaport, “Rouelle and Stahl. The Phlogistic Revolution in France,” Chymia-Annual Studies in The History of Chemistry 7 (1961): 73–102. For a different, more practice-focused discussion of the new chemistry in this period (including Rouelle and Venel), see Lissa Roberts’ influential article “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The “New” Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 (1995): 503–29.

22 For example, Galileo had argued that the successful “geometrical philosopher” must remove the “impediments of matter,” See Galileo Galilei, Galileo on the World Systems: A New Abridged Translation and Guide, trans. and ed. Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 199.

23 Diderot uses the phrase in his rather rhetorically charged – and barbed – critique of Maupertuis in the final sections of Diderot, Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, DPV, vol. 9, 82. Specifically, he criticises the Leibnizian overtones of Maupertuis’ system, in which, Diderot writes colourfully: “as a consequence of this universal copulation, the world, like a great animal, has a soul.” For a brief discussion of the idea’s Renaissance background, see Kaitaro, Diderot’s Holism, 102.

24 John Toland, Letters to Serena (London: B. Lintot, 1704), translated by Paul Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach as Lettres philosophiques sur l’origine des préjugés, du dogme de l’immortalité de l’âme, de l’idolâtrie et de la superstition ; sur le systeme de Spinoza et sur l’origine du mouvement dans la matiere (London: M.-M. Rey, 1768). There was some debate as to whether Diderot knew the work prior to the 1768 translation, but in any case it circulated in clandestine form as early as 1750.

25 I am not claiming that this is a dominant trend in the period, or that we should restructure our concept of the Enlightenment around it, as was the case with Jonathan Israel’s idea of “radical Enlightenment” which closely tracked precisely this trend; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Similarly, Paul Vernière claimed in the 1950s that the new articulation of materialism and the life sciences in this period was “neo-Spinozism,” see Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution, 2nd edn (1954; Paris: PUF, 1982), 529. For some reflection on these categories see my essay, “Epigenesis as Spinozism.”

26 For more on this topic see Falk Wunderlich, “Is Matter Essentially Active? John Toland on the “autokinesy” of Matter,” Libertinage et philosophie à l’époque classique 18 (2021): 201–17.

27 Toland, Letters to Serena, Letter V, 165.

28 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, IV.x.10.

29 Toland, Letters to Serena, C 4, C 3.

30 Toland, Letters to Serena, Letter V, 160, 159.

31 Toland, Letters to Serena, Letter V, 188.

32 Toland, Letters to Serena, 141f.; Wunderlich, “Is Matter Essentially Active?,” 209.

33 Toland, Letters to Serena, 135.

34 Stewart Duncan, “Materialism and the Activity of Matter in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy,” Philosophy Compass 11, no. 11 (2016): 674, as cited in Wunderlich, “Is Matter Essentially Active?,” 204.

35 The present article is not a study of chemical metaphors in Diderot, for which see e.g. Fumie Kawamura, Diderot et la chimie: science, pensée et écriture (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), and my review, “Review of Fumie Kawamura, Diderot et la chimie: science, pensée et écriture (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014),” H-France Review 16, no. 2 (2016): https://www.h-france.net/vol16reviews/vol16no2wolfe.pdf . However, it is worth emphasising that he certainly does not treat chemistry in “merely metaphorical” terms (I’m not taking any particular position on the role of metaphors and analogies in science here). While Diderot does consider that the scientist, the natural philosopher and the interpreter of Nature necessarily have to have recourse to imaginative constructs to explain complex phenomena, he nevertheless is a materialist philosophically (hence, reality does not reduce to images or metaphors), and his extension of chemical concepts beyond their strict framework, e.g. in seeking to articulate an idea of universally sensing matter, is not meant metaphorically … Thanks to Carmen Schmechel for pushing me to clarify this.

36 Physicalism has been a topic of much debate in contemporary philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, ever since it was first presented as a successor to “materialism” in the 1960s. For a brief overview see Brian P. McLaughlin, “Physicalism and Alternatives,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 2nd edition, (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), vol. 18, 106–13.

37 “Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement,” DPV, vol. 17, 16.

38 “Letter of October 15 1759,” in Diderot, Correspondance, vol. 2, 282. Diderot uses similar language in the article “Naître,” Enc., vol. 10 (1765), 10.

39 “Éléments de physiologie,” DPV, vol. 17, 334.

40 Diderot, Diderot to Voltaire, February 19 1758, in Œuvres, éd. L. Versini, vol. 5, Correspondance (Paris: R. Laffont, 1997), 73. Diderot adds rather sardonically that “D’Alembert will not, at his age, throw himself into the study of natural history” (doubtless having in mind D’Alembert’s more physico-mathematical sensibilities).

41 “Encyclopédie,” Enc., vol. 5 (1755) ; DPV, vol. 7, 185. For Diderot’s further reflections on the shift from “abstract sciences” to “experimental sciences” (in which he includes chemistry and natural history), and whether this shift is itself only temporary, see his entry Diderot, “Histoire naturelle,” Enc., vol. 8 (1765), 225–30.

42 “Spinosiste,” Enc., vol. 15 (1765), 474a (unattributed, but generally considered to be Diderot), discussed in my essay, “Epigenesis as Spinozism.”

43 Réfutation d’Helvétius, DPV, vol. 24, 555.

44 Robert James, A Medicinal Dictionary, Including Physic, Surgery, Anatomy, Chymistry, and Botany, in All Their Branches Relative to Medicine … , 3 vols. (London: T. Osborne, 1743–1745); Robert James, Dictionnaire universel de médecine, de chirurgie, de chymie, de botanique, d'anatomie, de pharmacie, d'histoire naturelle, etc … trans. Mrs Diderot, Marc-Antoine Eidous and François-Vincent Toussaint, 6 vols. (Paris: Briasson, 1746–1748).

45 His lecture notes on Rouelle were first published in 1887, and are now available in the standard edition of Diderot’s works: “Cours de chimie de Mr Rouelle,” DPV, vol. 9; the text used is the Bordeaux manuscript, produced in 1760 by a member of the Bordeaux Academy, François Latapie de Paule, on the basis of a lost manuscript by Diderot. For more on Rouelle including Diderot’s notes on his lectures see Jean Mayer, “Portrait d’un chimiste: Guillaume-François Rouelle (1703–1770),” Revue d'histoire des sciences 23, no. 4 (1970): 305–32.

46 “Diderot to Rousseau, letter of March 22–23 1757,” cited in Jean Mayer, Diderot homme de sciences (Rennes: Imprimerie bretonne, 1959), 42. Rousseau had attended Rouelle’s lectures earlier, in 1743–1745. On Rousseau’s own chemical researches and writings, see Rousseau et la chimie, ed. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Bruno Bernardi, special issue Corpus 36, (1999).

47 Éléments de physiologie, DPV, vol. 17, 510.

48 Jacques-André Naigeon, presenting Diderot’s Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, which he published in Naigeon, “Diderot” in Encyclopédie méthodique, vol. 2, Philosophie ancienne et moderne (Paris: Pancoucke, 1792), 153–228; as cited in Jean-Claude Guédon, “Chimie et matérialisme. La stratégie anti-newtonienne de Diderot,” Dix-huitième siècle 11 (1979), 185–200 (on 188).. François Pépin has noted in his numerous publications on the topic that one should not too easily think of these lectures as somehow turning Diderot towards chemistry, since a good deal of his reflection on the topic predates them. Thus the chemical queries Diderot puts forth in the Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, which appeared a year before he attended the lectures; and about six years before that, Diderot had translated James’ Dictionary (with commentary), which also featured chemical entries.

49 “Cours de chimie de Mr Rouelle,” DPV, vol. 9, 209.

50 Diderot, “Letter to Duclos of October 10 1765,” in Diderot, Œuvres, éd. L. Versini, vol. 5, Correspondance, 141. Diderot comes back to these metaphors in his notes on Rouelle’s lectures. They are also very prominent in texts with which Diderot was intimately familiar, such as the Encyclopédie entries “Inflammation” and “Oeconomie animale” (both by the vitalist physician Ménuret de Chambaud), which speak of how the chemists “reduced the body to a laboratory or distillation still” (Enc., vol. 8, 710–11 and Enc., vol. 11, 364a).

51 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, DPV, vol. 9, 29–30.

52 “Le chimiste Becker a dit que les physiciens n’étaient que des animaux stupides qui léchaient la surface des corps, et ce dédain n’est pas tout à fait mal fondé”: Diderot, Plan d’une université pour le gouvernement de Russie, 1775, cited in Pépin, La philosophie expérimentale de Diderot, 486n. Diderot is referring to the German chemist Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682), a great reader of Boyle, whose work also influenced Stahlian chemistry. See Ku-Ming (Kevin) Chang, “From Vitalistic Cosmos to Materialistic World: The Lineage of Johann Joachim Becher and Georg Ernst Stahl and the Shift of Early Modern Chymical Cosmology,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2007), 215–25.

53 Gabriel-François Venel, “Chymie,” Enc., vol. 3 (1753), 408–21.

54 As Elizabeth Williams writes, this entry “established both the theoretical framework of vitalist chemistry and the relationship vitalists thought proper between medicine and the ‘auxiliary sciences,’” see Elizabeth Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 163.

55 Bernard Joly, “L’anti-newtonianisme dans la chimie française au début du XVIII^e siècle,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 150–151, no. 53 (2003): 213–24. See also Fumie Kawamura, Diderot et la chimie, 84–90, 230n., on how Diderot is neither properly pro-Newtonian nor anti-Newtonian (contrary to Guédon’s portrayal of him as strictly the latter).

56 Charles T. Wolfe, “Vital Anti-mathematicism and the Ontology of the Emerging Life Sciences: From Mandeville to Diderot,” Synthese 196, no. 9 (2019): 3633–54 (online first 2017).

57 Gabriel-François Venel, Cours de chimie de 1761, ed. Christine Lehman based on the Wellcome Institute manuscript (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2010), 393. Venel authored roughly 300 entries on chemical topics in the Encyclopédie.

58 Venel, “Chymie,” Enc., vol. 3, 408–21 (on 415b).

59 Venel, “Chymie,” 409a.

60 François Pépin, La Philosophie expérimentale de Diderot et la chimie (Paris: Garnier, Histoire et philosophie des sciences, 2012).

61 Venel, “Chymie,” 410b.

62 Venel, “Chymie,” 410b.

63 Diderot, Rêve de D’Alembert, DPV, vol. 17, 96. As we will see below with the notion of “animalization,” this is both a localised, specific account of the chemistry of nutrition and digestion and a universalised account of how all of matter is actually or potentially animate. On earlier ideas of a “vital chemistry,” notably as tied to the concept of fermentation, see Antonio Clericuzio’s work, e.g. “Mechanism and Chemical Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England: Boyle’s Investigation of Ferments and Fermentation,” in Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy, ed. P. Distelzweig, B. Goldberg, and E. Ragland (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 271–93. Also see my brief remarks in Charles T. Wolfe, “Why was There No Controversy Over Life in the Scientific Revolution?” in Controversies in the Scientific Revolution, ed. V. Boantza and M. Dascal (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 187–219.

64 Rêve de D’Alembert, DPV, vol. 17, 90.

65 I do not presume here to provide an overview of this notion in eighteenth-century chemistry; others have done so. Suffice to it say that here, Diderot is aligning himself with the Stahlian current which emphasises heterogeneity over homogeneity (e.g. contra Johann Friedrich Henckel). In his notes on Rouelle’s lectures, Diderot also emphasises that Rouelle is by no means reducible to “Stahlianism.”

66 Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, DPV, vol. 17, 17–18.

67 Éléments de physiologie, DPV, vol. 17, 296.

68 Nisus had initially been a synonym of impetus in medieval texts, and slowly became distinguished from it: e.g. Bacon distinguishes motus and nisus, as motion vs. the tendency to motion, and Gassendi distinguishes between atoms whose motion is free (in motu) and those whose motion is hindered (in conatu ad motum or in nisu), see O. Bloch, La philosophie de Gassendi: nominalisme, matérialisme, métaphysique (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 218–19. Diderot’s usage reflects the sense, derived from Rouelle, of chemical latency, of an inner energy, an “inquiètude sourde” as he also says (a mute uneasiness). The editor of Diderot’s Eléments de physiologie, Jean Mayer, explains Diderot’s usage of the term as equivalent to “potential energy” (DPV, vol. 17, 297, n. 5).

69 DPV, vol. 9, 92.

70 Éléments de physiologie, DPV, vol. 17, 308.

71 In his entry “Leibnizianisme,” he brings together Aristotle’s entelechy, Leibniz’s monads, and “sensitivity as a general property of matter” (Enc., vol. 9, 371a). Leibnizian metaphysics and theories of generation had a great impact on eighteenth-century thought and have been considered to be major influences in the formulation of Diderot’s materialism among others. But they are presented in naturalised form, e.g., naturalised monads: “the monad, the real atom of nature, the true element of things” (Enc., vol. 9, 374a).

72 Diderot, “Letter to Duclos, 10 October 1765,” in Correspondance, vol. 5, 141.

73 Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, DPV, vol. 17, 34.

74 Baron d'Holbach, Système de la nature (1770 ; rev. ed. 1781 ; repr. Paris: Fayard-Corpus, 1990), book 1, chapter 8, 135; Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, DPV, vol. 17, 296f. While the term was rare in Diderot’s period (it occurs once in the Encyclopédie, in the entry on “Blood”) the language of the “animalization” of matter is explicitly present in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with Cabanis and Lamarck (there is also an entry “Animalisation” in the Encyclopédie méthodique) and the term in fact became a major technical term in the newly constituted organic chemistry. However, that lies outside the scope of the present paper.

75 Indeed Diderot distinguishes between three processes: “Vegetation, life or sensibility and animalization are three successive operations. The vegetable kingdom could well be, and have been, the original source of the animal kingdom, and have been derived in turn from the mineral kingdom, with the latter emanating from universal heterogeneous matter” (Éléments de physiologie, DPV, vol. 17, 296). For more on chemical theories of nutrition in this period, see Cécilia Bognon-Küss, “Between Biology and Chemistry in the Enlightenment: How Nutrition Shapes Vital Organization. Buffon, Bonnet, C.F. Wolff,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 41, no. 1 (2019): 1–46.

76 Diderot, Observations sur Hemsterhuis, DPV, vol. 24, 304.

77 Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, DPV, vol. 17, 18.

78 Rêve de D’Alembert, DPV, vol. 17, 138–39.

79 See Pierre Léger, “Diderot et la théorie de la ‘perception des rapports’: construction et enjeux d’une esthétique matérialiste au milieu du XVIIIe siècle” (PhD thesis, Aix-Marseille Université, 2023).

80 Diderot, Observations sur Hemsterhuis, DPV, vol. 24, 274, 284.

81 Diderot, DPV, vol. 5, 116.

82 Diderot, “Cours de chimie de Mr Rouelle,” DPV, vol. 9, 209.

83 Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, DPV, vol. 17, 34.

84 I have sought to emphasise this point about Diderot in my publications on the topic, but I should also acknowledge how much I learned from Jean-Claude Bourdin and François Pépin on this point (including in the research group on Diderot we worked in, under the auspices of the CERPHI in Paris in the late 1990s and early 2000s).

85 Guédon, “Chimie et matérialisme,” 200.

86 As one reviewer seemed to think I was arguing.

87 Georges Barral, “Diderot et la médecine. Un ouvrage projeté par Claude Bernard,” Chronique médicale (15 février 1900): 126–28.

88 Rêve de D’Alembert, DPV, vol. 17, 113. Granted, this seems to emphasise finitude and mortality more than the inherent animation of matter, but Diderot is emphatic, in this work and elsewhere, about how dead matter is merely in a temporary state; it is always potentially (or actually) alive. Hence also the emphasis on movement and “vicissitude.”

89 “What a difference there is, between a sensing, living watch and a golden, iron, silver or copper watch!” (Éléments de physiologie, DPV, vol. 17, 335).

90 Antonine Nicoglou, Charles T. Wolfe, “Introduction: Sketches of a Conceptual History of Epigenesis,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40, no. 64 (2018): https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-018-0230-1

91 Rêve de D’Alembert, DPV, vol. 17, 107.

92 Letters to Serena, 192.

93 François Pépin, “Le matérialisme pluriel de Diderot: monisme et hétérogénéités des matières,” in Lumières, matérialisme et morale, ed. C. Duflo (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016), 73–95. Pépin’s work on Diderot in general and Diderot and chemistry in particular is first-rate; I am just expressing some scholarly micro-disagreement.

94 Enc. vol, 8, 577a.

95 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, DPV, vol. 9, 92.

96 Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), book 2, lines 340–41 (on 44).

97 Lettre sur les aveugles, DPV, vol. 4, 50.

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Charles Wolfe

Charles Wolfe is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and co-director, ERRAPHIS at the Université de Toulouse. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (2019) and Lire le matérialisme (2020), and has edited or coedited volumes on monsters, organisms, brains, empiricism, epigenesis, the conceptual foundations of biology, mechanism and vitalism, Locke and Canguilhem, including (w. D. Jalobeanu) the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences and (w. J. Symons, in progress) The History and Philosophy of Materialism. He is co-editor of the Springer book series “History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences”. Papers available at [https://univ-tlse2.academia.edu/CharlesWolfe]. Email: [email protected]