 Diderot’s earliest writings from this period, pursued while the Encyclopédie project was still ramping up to full speed, continued the philosophical and literary explorations initiated in the 1740s. Taken as a whole they reflect his lifelong preoccupation with questions of life, liberty, purpose, and order within an Epicurean cosmos that may not be governed by a providential creator, along with his continuing interest in the epistemological problem of discerning the nature and principles of such a world, especially as they related to the emerging biological sciences of the eighteenth century. Key works in this vein include Lettre sur les sourds et muets à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent, a continuation of sorts to his Lettre sur les aveugles, and Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, a work that retains the episodic, propositional structure of his Pensées philosophiques while expanding the explanations within each section.