The New Mechanical Philosophy

Download or read book The New Mechanical Philosophy written by Stuart Glennan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of the scientist's challenge is to balance the complexity and particularity of mechanisms with our need for representations of them that are abstract and general. This volume weaves together metaphysical and methodological questions about mechanisms. Metaphysically, it explores the implications of the mechanistic framework for our understanding of classical philosophical questions about the nature of objects, properties, processes, events, causal relations, natural kinds and laws of nature. Methodologically, the book explores how scientists build models to represent and understand phenomena and the mechanisms responsible for them. Using this account of representation, Glennan offers a scheme for characterizing the enormous diversity of things that scientists call mechanisms, and explores the scope and limits of mechanistic explanation.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy written by Stuart Glennan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists studying the burning of stars, the evolution of species, DNA, the brain, the economy, and social change, all frequently describe their work as searching for mechanisms. Despite this fact, for much of the twentieth century philosophical discussions of the nature of mechanisms remained outside philosophy of science. The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into four Parts: Historical perspectives on mechanisms The nature of mechanisms Mechanisms and the philosophy of science Disciplinary perspectives on mechanisms. Within these Parts central topics and problems are examined, including the rise of mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century; what mechanisms are made of and how they are organized; mechanisms and laws and regularities; how mechanisms are discovered and explained; dynamical systems theory; and disciplinary perspectives from physics, chemistry, biology, biomedicine, ecology, neuroscience, and the social sciences. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of science, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as metaphysics, philosophy of psychology, and history of science.

Download or read book Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion written by Klaas van Berkel and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-08-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Historians of science and the philosophy of science find the substance and stance of Isaac Beeckman's thought highly interesting, for it represented an early attempt to develop a comprehensive picture of the world by means of mechanistic theory, that is, forces acting upon one another. Besides possibly influencing Descartes, this view broke away from medieval religious assumptions and belief in occult forces. Berkel teases out Beeckman's evolving approach to nature by means of his extensive journals, explaining the leading concept of "picturability." Beeckman supplied a stepping stone (one still not widely appreciated) on the path that led to the scientific revolution"--

Download or read book Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers written by David S. Sytsma and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Baxter, one of the 17th century's most famous Puritans, is known as an author of devotional literature. But he was also skilled in medieval philosophy. In this work, David Sytsma draws on largely unexamined works to present a chronogolical and thematic account of Baxter's relation to the people and concepts involved in the rise of mechanical philosophy in late-17th-century England

Download or read book The New Mechanical Philosophy written by Stuart Glennan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.

Download or read book The Mechanical World written by Beate Krickel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph examines the metaphysical commitments of the new mechanistic philosophy, a way of thinking that has returned to center stage. It challenges a variant of reductionism with regard to higher-level phenomena, which has crystallized as a default position among these so-called New Mechanists. Furthermore, it opposes those philosophers who reject the possibility of interlevel causation. Contemporary philosophers believe that the explanation of scientific phenomena requires the discovery of relevant mechanisms. As a result, new mechanists are, in the main, concerned solely with epistemological questions. But, the author argues, their most central claims rely on metaphysical assumptions. Thus, they must also take into account metaphysics, a system of thought concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world around it. This branch of philosophy does indeed matter to the empirical sciences. The chapters investigate the nature of mechanisms, their components, and the ways in which they can bring about different phenomena. In addition, the author develops a novel account of causation in terms of activities. The analysis provides the basis for many further research projects on mechanisms and their relations to, for example, the mind-body problem, realization, multiple realization, natural kinds, causation, laws of nature, counterfactuals, and scientific levels.

Download or read book Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy written by Margaret J. Osler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-07 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The difference between Pierre Gassendi's (1592-1655) and René Descartes' (1596-1650) versions of the mechanical philosophy directly reflected the differences in their theological presuppositions. Gassendi described a world utterly contingent on divine will and expressed his conviction that empirical methods are the only way to acquire knowledge about the natural world. Descartes, on the contrary, described a world in which God had embedded necessary relations, some of which enable us to have a priori knowledge of substantial parts of the natural world. In this book, Professor Osler explores theological conceptions of contingency and necessity in the world and how these ideas influenced the development of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century. She examines the transformation of medieval ideas about God's relationship to the Creation into seventeenth-century ideas about matter and method as embodied in early articulations of the mechanical philosophy. Refracted through the prism of the mechanical philosophy, these theological conceptualizations of contingency and necessity in the world were mirrored in different styles of science that emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century.