An influential thinker distills years of work on the philosophy of movement into one accessible accountWhy are city dwellers worldwide walking on average ten percent faster than they were a decade ago? Why are newcomer immigrant groups so often maligned when migration has always constituted civilization? To analyze and understand the depth of the reasons, Thomas Nail suggests that it serves us well to turn to a philosophy of movement. Synthesizing and extending man...

Karl Marx is the most historically foundational and systematic critic of capitalism to date, and the years since the 2008 financial crisis have witnessed a rebirth of his popular appeal. In a world of rising income inequality, right-wing nationalisms, and global climate change, people are again looking to the father of modern socialism for answers. As this book argues, every era since Marx's death has reinvented him to fit its needs. There is not one Marx forever and for all time. There ar...

Towards the end of her life, Virginia Woolf defined her “philosophy”-the “constant idea” that “makes her a writer.” She wrote that this idea had given her “the strongest pleasure known to [her].” She called these “exceptional moments,” or “moments of being.”Thomas Nail contends that Woolf is a philosopher of being. And these "moments of being" as forming a unique process philosophy of motion. In her description of these moments Woolf gives us access to a world in m...

Despite -- and perhaps because of -- increasing global mobility, there are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nat...

We need a new philosophy of the earth. Geological time used to refer to slow and gradual processes, but today we are watching land sink into the sea and forests transform into deserts. We can even see the creation of new geological strata made of plastic, chicken bones, and other waste that could remain in the fossil record for millennia or longer. Crafting a philosophy of geology that rewrites natural and human history from the broader perspective of movement, Thomas Nail provides a new m...

More than at any other time in human history, we live in an age defined by movement and mobility; and yet, we lack a unifying theory which takes this seriously as a starting point for philosophy. The history of philosophy has systematically explained movement as derived from something else that does not move: space, eternity, force, and time. Why, when movement has always been central to human societies, did a philosophy based on movement never take hold? This book finally overturns this l...

Deleuze remains indifferent to the ambient pathos related to the end of metaphysics and compares the undertakings of destruction, overcoming and deconstruction of metaphysics with the gestures of murderers. He considers himself “a pure metaphysician,” which is rather unique in the contemporary philosophical landscape. What are we to make of this and similar claims? What do they mean in light of the effort made during the last several centuries to overcome, overturn, destroy, or deconstruct...

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time.Rather than viewing migrati...