Shifting sands in philosophical mechanics

Abstract

Abstract Around 1750, the locus for grappling with the problem of bodies changes from philosophy to rational mechanics. In Chapter 7, the authors explain the reasons for this watershed transition. They identify conceptual difficulties with three notions that philosophers had relied on—mass, contact-action, and extended-body motion. They argue that professional philosophers at the time failed to incorporate pertinent advances in mechanics into their accounts of bodies, opening a rift between philosophical physics and rational mechanics. And, they uncover the key challenge within mechanics going forward; namely, the problem of constrained motion. This is the lens in subsequent chapters for analyzing the developments in rational mechanics most relevant to the problem of bodies.