ABSTRACT
A common misunderstanding concerning early modern and Enlightenment materialism is that it is in essence, or by definition, "mechanistic materialism". This chapter seeks to reconstruct the process of articulation of a vital materialism, which is so different from the old vision of a mechanistic materialism. It suggests a general distinction between two forms of materialism, followed by a second, more specific distinction between active and passive matter and the consequent versions of materialism. The chapter considers what it means for materialism to be specifically vital, its notion of embodiment cum reduction, which means that it is not a wholesale holism. Vital materialism embraces a reductionist dimension in its appeal to a medical approach to body: soul relations. The two basic materialist theses, which are independent of each other, although they can also be found together, are: a cosmological thesis about the materiality of the world and an "identity" thesis.
