Who's afraid of inertia? The Cartesian-Newtonian legacy reconsidered / Sarah Ellenzweig -- Varieties of vital materialism / Charles T. Wolfe -- Plastic matters / Jess Keiser -- Deleuze and new materialism: naturalism, norms, and ethics / Keith Ansell-Pearson -- Materialism, old and new, and the party of humanity / Catherine Wilson -- Engendering new materializations: feminism, nature, and the challenge to disciplinary proper objects / Angela Willey -- What sort of thing is the social? Or, Durkheim and Deleuze on organization and infrastructure / Ian Lowrie -- The cognitive nonconscious and the new materialism / N. Katherine Hayles -- Scale variance and the concept of matter / Derek Woods -- Detachment theory: agency, nature, and the normative nihilism of new materialism / Lenny Moss -- Materialism, constructivism, and political skepticism: Leibniz, Hobbes, and the erudite libertines / Mogens Lærke -- Normativity matters: philosophical naturalism and political theory / Christian J. Emden -- Concluding (Irenic) postscript: naturalism as a response to the new materialism / John H. Zammito.
New materialism challenges conventional theories of understanding human being and subjectivity, which it regards as shaped by mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: the body, the role of affect and the emotions, gender, temporality, agency and vitalism. This collection, which includesNew materialism challenges conventional theories of understanding human being and subjectivity, which it regards as shaped by mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: the body, the role of affect and the emotions, gender, temporality, agency and vitalism. This collection, which includesNew materialism challenges conventional theories of understanding human being and subjectivity, which it regards as shaped by mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: the body, the role of affect and the emotions, gender, temporality, agency and vitalism. This collection, which includes",,,,,"New materialism challenges conventional theories of understanding human being and subjectivity, which it regards as shaped by mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: the body, the role of affect and the emotions, gender, temporality, agency and vitalism. This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature and science, is the first to ask what is 'new' about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary perspective. Against current theories of new materialism it argues for a deeper engagement with materialism's history; questions whether matter can be 'lively'; and asks whether new materialism's wish to revitalize of politics and the political lives up to its promise.