Diderot and a poetics of science

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This study explores the rhetorical and linguistic modes of discourse that articulate Diderot's theory and methodology of experimental science and philosophy. Diderot's focus, particularly in De l'Interprétation de la nature, on the importance of experimentation in the domain of nature's material reality necessarily poses the epistemological and literary problematic of representation whose textual resolutions and strategies constitute a poetics of science.The principle of nature is examined as textual referent, as image, as a complex weave of descriptive and narrative functions that organizes the operations of the experimenting, narrating and writing subjects. In restoring the dimensions of 18th-century epistemology and language theory to Diderot's proposals for experimental philosophy, this study provides a model for reading Diderot across the demarcations of philosophy, esthetics, language theory and fiction, raising issues central to the interdisciplinary concerns of modern critical inquiry.