ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on "new materialisms" to mobilize and radicalize energies across the humanities and beyond for cultural and political interventions from the local to the global level. It points out that beginning with Epicurus, materialism's progressive stance was inextricable from its rejection of religion and any investment in supernatural, immaterial entities. The book suggests inconsistencies around new materialism's embrace of Gilles Deleuze as a figurehead for its posthumanism. It also focuses on materialism in his Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. The book emphasizes the ways that mechanism and materialism, activity and passivity, are more closely allied and interwoven than people tend to think. It seeks to complicate the shibboleth known as the "Cartesian–Newtonian legacy" through a closer examination of Rene Descartes' and Issac Newton's matter theory and its reception in the period, focusing on the early history of the concept of inertia.