 His materialist notion of embodiment means that Diderot does not oppose the living body as a kind of subjectivity to the world of matter overall. As is particularly apparent with Saunderson in the Lettre sur les aveugles and the account of the nervous system in the Rêve de D’Alembert, Diderot “pit[s] the unity of sensibility against a Cartesian unity of subjectivity” (Gaukroger 2010: 416). However, this emphasis on embodiment is neither a “top-down,” emergent view of life (even if “life is not just motion”), nor an antireductionist position (contrast Kaitaro 1997). For Diderot, emphasis on the features of the living body and a deflationary and/or reductionist attitude go hand in hand. “The action of the soul on the body is the action of one part of the body on another”, he writes, “and the action of the body on the soul is again that of one part of the body on another” (EP; DPV XVII: 334–335). This was certainly reductionist in the eyes of defenders of an immortal and/or immaterial soul, but it is not per se eliminativist inasmuch as Diderot is saying that “mental processes” (if we take the language of “soul” here to be psychological language) are bodily processes, not that they are illusory or otherwise unreal. Similarly, commenting on the Dutch scientist Franz Hemsterhuis’ manuscript, he notes: “wherever I read soul I replace it with man or animal” (DPV XXIV: 340). This is a venerable trait of materialisms going back at least as far as Lucretius, and Diderot does not necessarily deploy this tradition to deny the existence of the soul, but rather to challenge the “animist” or the “idealist” claim “to explain anything without the body” (EP; DPV XVII: 334). Even more interestingly, this shift can also be seen in broader terms as a shift within reductionist strategies, which we can also classify as types of reduction.