ABSTRACT
Lucretius was a materialist who understood thinking to be a thoroughly material and performative activity inseparable from nature. Matter, for Lucretius, was neither reductionistic, mechanistic or vitalist but fundamentally indeterminate, swerving and irreducible to any substance. As such, thinking does not create representations of nature because it is nothing other than nature itself. This chapter thus argues that Lucretius was perhaps the first process-materialist philosopher and held a profoundly original kinetic theory of knowledge and thinking. And it further contends that this unique perspective on thinking and materialism was directly related to his methodological practice as a philosophical poet.
