Thomas Nail, Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism – Edinburgh University Press, December 2023

Tells a new history of materialism – from prehistory to the present – that resists stasis, heirarchy and domination

• Traces a lineage of thinkers who have philosophically integrated ideas of matter, motion, indeterminacy, relationality and process
• Discusses thinkers drawn from the ancient to the modern – from the Bronze Age to quantum physics – who each offer their own kind of evidence for a world without metaphysics or hierarchy
• Shows that the established hierarchies that govern Western thought and society are contingent and performative – there is no ontologically legitimate justification for social, aesthetic or scientific domination

Thomas Nail traces an alternative history of ancient and modern thinkers who share a radically different understanding of the nature of matter and motion within the Euro-Western tradition. From Archaic Greek poetry and Bronze Age Minoan religion to the Roman poet Lucretius, and from German philosopher Karl Marx and English writer Virginia Woolf to contemporary physicists Carlo Rovelli and Karen Barad, Nail identifies a minor tradition of what he calls kinetic materialism and its three central ideas: indeterminacy, relationality and process.