 But what of actual bodies in this universe of living matter? Diderot’s notion of body is quite different from, say, that of Descartes and Hobbes. “As a physicist”, Diderot writes, “one should never say the body qua body, because this is no longer physics, it is making abstractions which lead to nothing” (PPMM; DPV XVII: 16). As he wrote to Sophie Volland, “Have you ever thought seriously about what it is to live? … Life is not just motion, it is something else” (letter of 15 October 1759). Indeed, he may quite fairly be described as a theorist of embodiment.