Le moule et le modèle: l’expérience et la norme dans la Lettre sur les aveugles et De l’interprétation de la nature

In Diderot’s works, the category of the model emerges—between the late 1740s and early 1750s—within the framework of an inquiry into nature and its productions. The Lettre sur les aveugles and De l’interprétation de la nature serve, in this respect, as a genuine philosophical laboratory, in which Diderot tests his conceptual tools by exploring their conditions and domains of application. This investigation of nature reconfigures, at various levels, the problem of the transition from case to rule: whether in the relationship between individual and species, in questions of generation, or in the status of anomalies, what is consistently at stake is the model. To shed light on this dynamic, I will show how Diderot constructs a conceptual constellation that, in dialogue with Buffon’s natural philosophy and, to some extent, that of Maupertuis, explores the multiple forms of the model and its processes of production. The moule and the prototype thus emerge as attempts to conceptualize the variable and dynamic relations of a norm that arises from the case and becomes visible only through it.