History and Philosophy of Materialism

Charles T. Wolfe is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse-2 Jean Jaurès, France.John Symons is Professor of Philosophy and Courtesy Professor of Computer Science at The University of Kansas, USA and Director of the Center for Cyber Social Research.

• Introduction: The History and Philosophy of Materialism Charles T. Wolfe and John Symons Part 1: Ancient, Non-Western and Medieval Philosophy 1. Aristotle and Materialism Sophia Connell 2. A complex matter: Epicurus’ materialism Francesca Masi and Francesco Verde 3. Materialism, Monism and Emergent Properties in the Latin Middle Ages Aurélien Robert 4. Materialism in Medieval Islamic thought Mali Alinejad Zanjani 5. Conquest-Era Nahua Metaphysics: An Indigenous Materialism? James Maffie 6. Materialism in India Piotr Balcerowicz 7. Materialism in Chinese thought Shu-an Han Part 2: Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy 8. Cosmological Materialism in the Renaissance Pietro Daniel Omodeo 9. Epicurean Materialism revisited: Gassendi on the Human Soul Delphine Bellis 10. Margaret Cavendish’s Materialism: Giving up the Ghost in the Machine Marcy Lascano 11. Malebranche: A Materialist Malgré Lui? Colin Chamberlain 12. Locke and his critics on the possibility of material minds Stewart Duncan 13. Early modern critiques of materialism and atheism: Cudworth, Clarke and Berkeley Kenneth Pearce Part 3: Enlightenment Materialisms 14. Anthony Collins on Texture and Structural Materialism Adam Harmer 15. From Active Matter and Movement to ‘Sensibilité’ and Social Harmony: D’Holbach’s enchanted materialism Ruggero Sciuto 16. Materialism in the German enlightenment, ca. 1690-1790 Falk Wunderlich 17. Is Materialism Atheistic? Charles Wolfe, Eleonora Alfano and John Symons Part 4: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy 18. Materialism between science and metaphysics: Controversies in Germany (1840s-1870s) Paolo Pecere 19. The specter of materialism haunts France and French spiritualism. Victor Cousin’s attempt at exorcism Delphine Antoine-Mahut 20. Darwinism, Positivism, Materialism, Relativism: Science and Philosophy in the 1860s Trevor Pearce 21. When matter ceased to matter. The disappearance of the philosophical problem of matter from physics in the late nineteenth century Marij van Strien Part 5: Twentieth-Century Philosophy 22. History of Materialism and Intelligent Materialism Charles T. Wolfe 23. Materialism and Dialectics: Reassessing the Soviet tradition from Lenin to Ilyenkov Sascha Freyberg and Giorgi Kobakhidze 24. Russian Marxism and the Materialist Interpretation of Spinoza Justin Steinberg 25. Althusser’s Materialisms: Dialectical, Historical, and Aleatory William Lewis 26. Freudo-Marxist Materialism Cat Moir Wolfe 27. Neurath’s Physicalism John Symons Part 6: Contemporary Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics and Critique 28. Our Mind-Body Problem Tom Polger 29. The Materialist Sixties Daniel Stoljar 30. From Materialism To Physicalism: An Opinionated Sketch Andrew Melnyk 31. Matter: A Feminist Reading Emanuela Bianchi. Index

'… Charles T. Wolfe and John Symons have published a collection of considerable ambition: thirty-one chapters covering all periods in the history of philosophy and extending into diverse cultural and geographical areas. The stated objective is to offer English-speaking readers the first history of materialism since the translation of Fredrich-Albert Lange's work in 1925. … The result is more than a simple compilation of current knowledge on materialisms: it is a work that constantly questions its object and the possibility of tracing its history.' - Guillaume Coissard, Astérion'One of the book's great merits, in short, is to shatter the monolithic, largely fantasized image of Materialism, not to leave it in ruins but to experiment with new ways of recomposing and reinventing it, that is to say, also to restore to it, in the present, the critical force that is rightfully its own. The History and Philosophy of Materialism is ultimately a decisive contribution to the ongoing effort to practice the history of philosophy differently, that is to say, to write other histories of it, in the plural.' - Matthieu Renault, Actuel Marx 2025/2 n° 78