Resumen de Les “Éléments de physiologie” de Diderot: une vulgaraisation scientifique sensible
In Éléments de physiologie, Denis Diderot aims to join art and nature to explain the knowledge of human physiology. This work appears as a dialogue between literature and medicine. Thus, Diderot, as a philosopher and a writer, uses a lexicon, a style and some rhetorical devices that are normally extraneous to the medical treatise. In this work, Diderot paint inductively in the reader’s mind the most abstract concepts as perceivable images by using a connotative lexicon, several figures of speech and hypotyposis. As a philosopher, he embellishes is scientific work whit several images related to everyday life. He uses a perceivable conceptualisation that copes with the deficit of verbal language. In this way, he allows the reader to decipher a complex reality, which escapes more close theoretical systems. As a writer, Diderot considers imagination as the instrument of knowledge. He supports his scientific treatise with metaphors and similitudes from technique, biology and art. By using such devices Diderot entrusts his vision of an in fieri reality to a reader who can’t understand abstracts concepts. Diderot’s style puts the reader at the centre of his work: by interpreting the writer’s images, the reader transforms the apparent imperfection of Éléments de physiologie in a temporary perfection. The reader is able to recreate a mecanico-vitalistic system, where everything harmonically perform its role.
