Overview

From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of motion. But what is a body? And how can we know how they behave? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine the struggle for a theory of bodies.At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was the branch of philosophy that studied bodies in general. Its primary task was to provide a qualitative account of the nature of bodies, including their essential properties, causal powers, and generic behaviors. Pursued by a variety of figures both canonical (from Leibniz to Kant) and less familiar (from Du Châtelet and Euler to d'Alembert and Lagrange), this proved a difficult task. At stake were the appropriate epistemologies and methods for theorizing about the natural world. Solutions demanded the combined resources of philosophy, physics, and mechanics: what Brading and Stan call a

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9780197678954

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The writing is engaging but technical and aimed at specialists. Brading and Stan characterize the book's intended audience as philosophers of physics, science, and metaphysics and those interested in the history of modern philosophy. A strong, nuanced, technical work with a limited audience. * Choice * This book is a major contribution to the future study of the history and philosophy of physics and natural philosophy writ large ... This book itself addresses a veritable gap in scholarship and the authors have painstakingly provided a much-needed account. There is no doubt that any future work in this domain will be inspired by this work and will have to critically respond to it. * Tzuchien Tho, The Leibniz Review *

The writing is engaging but technical and aimed at specialists. Brading and Stan characterize the book's intended audience as philosophers of physics, science, and metaphysics and those interested in the history of modern philosophy. A strong, nuanced, technical work with a limited audience. * Choice *

Author Information

Katherine Brading is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. She is co-editor of Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections (with Elena Castellani) and author of Emilie Du Châtelet and the Foundations of Physical Science. Marius Stan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is author of Kant's Natural Philosophy.

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