The New Mechanical Philosophy

includes index and biblioraphy

1. What is the new mechanical philosophy .....1 The craving for generality ....2 Antecedents of the new mechanism ....5 The philosophy of nature, the philosophy of science and naturalism ....9 The book in outline ....13 Conclusion ....16 2. Mechanisms ....17 Entities and activities .....19 Organization, phenomena and responsibility ....22 Mechanisms systems and processes ....25 Entities and activities elaborated .....29 Boundaries ...36 Mechanisms, regularities and laws ....44 New mechanical ontology ....48 Conclusion ....56 3. Models, mechanisms and how explanattions ....59 What are models ....59 Models and generality .....62 Models and theories ....64 Mechanistic models and how explanations ....66 How possibly, how-actually and how roughly models ....68 Abstraction and idealization in mechanistic models ....73 Mechanistic and narrative explanation ....83 Conclusion .....85 4. Mechanisms, models and kinds .....87 How real and natural are natural kinds ....89 Mechanism kinds and the models first approach ....92 Kinds of activities and entities ......95 Abstraction and kinds: Some lessons from software engineering ...99 Conclusion ....105 5.Types of mechanisms ....106 Types of phenomena ....108Types of organization .....118 Types of etiology ....124 Stochastic mehanisms ....132 Some mechanism kinds ....135 Conclusion: Types pf mechanisms and the unity of science ....143 6. Mechanisms and causation ....145 Methodological preliminaries ....146 The variety of causal claims .....148 Singularism and intrinsicness ....151 Production and relevance ....153 The mechanistic theory of causation .....156 Mechanisms and generalizations ...160 Mechanisms and manipulations ....163 Conclusion ....168 7. Production and relevance ....170 Physical theories of causal production ....171 Mechanistic production and relevance ....174 Events ....177 The varieties of mechanistic production ....179 Fundamental mechanisms and production ....184 The problem of irrelevant production .....193 The problem of non-productive causation ....196 Causal relevance and actual difference-making ....200 Causal relevance and inter-level causation ....204 Just enough reduction ....207 Conclusion ....209 8. Explanation: Mechanistic and otherwise ....211 Explanation: the big picture ....211 Explanation: ontic, epistemic and modal ...218 Three kinds of natural explanation ....223 Bare causal explanations .....224 Mechanistic explanations .....228 Non-causal explanation ....230 Conclusion: what makes explanations causal or non-causal ....237