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Previously, “matérialisme” attracted those who attempted to extend to scientific knowledge and even to political action the methods that seemed to have proved fruitful in physics and chemistry. The belief in human progress through the accumulation of scientific understanding tended to ignore certain grey areas, such the ambiguities of the notion that assigns to matter the characteristics that classical science attributes to nature. Contemporary scientific practice and philosophical reflection has rediscovered, through a consideration of contingency, the infinite variety of material processes. Knowledge of determinations is thus no longer confused with the unfounded affirmation of inexorable necessity. Materialism can escape the limits of progressivism and open the way to a philosophy of liberty.