We live in an age of motion: This is the starting point from which Thomas Nail positions The Philosophy of Movement: An Introduction from a personal and historical perspective. The book aims at systematising Nail’s movement-oriented theorisation, and at the same time, making it accessible to non-specialists. It opens with an explanation of the two main motivations underlying his thought.

The philosophy of movement proposed by Nail stems from a first critical motivation with a specific polemical target. As he states, Euro-Western thought has traditionally considered movement as subordinate to more primary principles. Unmoving entities, such as mind or spirit, have been valued as superior to moving ones, such as bodies or nature. Under a logic of domination, stasis has been placed above movement in the same way form has been
placed above matter, God above humans, citizens above migrants, or men above women. By criticising such an ontological hierarchy, arguing for the primacy of movement means suggesting that “there is no absolute top” (5). Through a possibilistic view, a philosophy of movement thus aims to contribute to an ethics of togetherness and survival against domination and exclusion.

The second motivation emerges from a meditation on four major phenomena that define an unprecedented age of motion and help to understand the primacy of movement: 1) the advent of quantum physics, for which the world is made by vibrating fields of energy at every scale; 2) the pervasiveness of digital media and mobile devices, which means that we are constantly immersed in digital fluxes; 3) the increase in human mobility driven by globalisation and the consequent formation of highly mobile societies; and 4) climate change, which is making even the Earth itself, not to mention its species and materials, more mobile. According to Nail, such conditions constitute a historical opportunity to gain an alternative point of view and to discuss some cornerstones of Western thought.