This article, which introduces this special issue on new empiricisms and new materialisms, focuses on two of the many conditions that enable this new work: first, an ethical imperative to rethink the nature of being to refuse the devastating dividing practices of the dogmatic Cartesian image of thought and, second, a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation in the becoming of existence. The article includes a brief description of how matter matters differently in this new work, of Deleuze and Guattari’s description of philosophy as the laying out of a plane that enables new concepts, a discussion of the “new,” and how/if methodology can be thought in the “new.”