 Diderot’s eclecticism from this perspective was not simply a negative reaction against dogmatism, even if in his important Encyclopédie article “Éclectisme”, he opposes eclecticism to sectarianism. He also explicitly ties eclecticism to an attention to language and discursivity in philosophy. Founders of discursivity are eclectics, distinct from syncretists (Diderot mentions Luther and Bruno as examples). However, he fully disapproves of the Alexandrian school of eclectics, while attaching himself to modern eclecticism (including Campanella, Hobbes, and Bacon, but also Descartes, a reference that makes most sense if read through Malebranchian Cartesianism): “The eclectic does not randomly gather together truths, nor leave them in isolation; even less does she force them into some determinate plan” (Enc. V: 270). Diderot presents both Bacon and Descartes as eclectics, which we might actually think of as meaning “empiricists”, in the sense of placing experience and experiment at the center of knowledge-gathering practices. But we should also see this in terms of language, remembering the link between Montaigne and his project of representing natural experience through his new genre of the essay, and Bacon’s own attachments to empiricism, experimentalism, and the genre of the essay, along with other forms of representational writing, including fictional storytelling and the use of aphorisms alongside other more recognizable philosophical genres.