 We can also see this anti-foundationalist and experimentalist attitude as challenging Descartes’ “chains of reasons” which extend to all our knowledge of things; Diderot begins the above work by explaining that he will let his thoughts follow the order in which objects presented themselves to his reflection (§ I). Such a view is also resonant with what we might term Malebranche’s quasi-sensationalism, which locates scientific thinking in the reduction of our stream of sensate observations to the rationalizing logics of mathematical analysis, if we consider that, aside from the “occasionalism” which has dominated his Anglophone reception, much of Malebranche’s Recherche de la verité is about how our bodily passions and our sensations produce errors in us, which makes Malebranche a sensationalist in recognizing that conception of the human subject as the start for any epistemological project of knowing. Diderot, from the Lettre sur les aveugles on, is a dedicated empiricist and sensationalist, although he expands the remit of these philosophical programs far beyond “epistemology”.