First English comprehensive contribution to one of the leading German physicists in the 19th century

An informative account of a highly important part of the history of science and a reconstruction of a conception of science that is greatly widespread to this day

Profound analysis of the interaction between classical physics and philosophy of nature

New insights into the impact of Immanuel Kant's philosophy of science and metaphysics of nature on the philosophy of physics

Introduction A. Mechanism between the Classical and the Modern I. The Concept of Mechanism 1. What is Meant by 'Mechanism'? 2. On the Concept of Classical Mechanics II. Mechanism as a Classical Philosophy of Nature 1. The Classical Concept of Science 2. Two Instances of the Legitimation of Classical Mechanism a) Galileo's Scientism
b) Descartes' Metaphysics and his Concept of Hypothesis III. The Three Lines of Traditions of Mechanism 1. Materialist Mechanism (Boyle and Huygens) 2. Dualist Mechanism (Newton and Boscovich) 3. Dynamic Mechanism (Leibniz and Kant) IV. Contours of a Modern Philosophy of Nature 1. Hypotheticity as a Characteristic of the Modern Conception
of Science 2. Interpretation of Nature as World-View B. Helmholtz's Mechanism at the Dawn of Modernity I. Helmholtz as Educator, Natural Scientist, and Research Strategist II. Helmholtz's Classical Mechanism 1. The Mechanistic Programmatic of 1847 a) The Grounding of Dual Mechanism
b) The Energetic Heuristic of Mechanism 2. Mechanics as Foundation of Geometry 3. Helmholtz's Classical Conception of Science and Nature a) His Conception of Science Until the End
of the Eighteen Sixties
b) His Classical Mechanistic Conception of Nature III. The Hypothesization of Helmholtz's Mechanism 1. Helmholtz's Conception of Science Since the Beginning
of the Eighteen Seventies 2. Helmholtz's Model-Theoretical Mechanism.
Mechanistic Analogies and Mathematical Unification IV. Conditions and Causes of the Change in Helmholtz's
Conception of Nature and Science Bibliography Index