Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason av Katherine (Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy Duke University) Brading, Marius (Associate

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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 Ch¿let and Euler to d''Alembert and Lagrange), this proved a difficult task. At stake were the appropriate epistemologies and methodsfor theorizing about the natural world. Solutions demanded t