Introduction

Abstract

Biological and neuroscientific phenomena are in the fore of works on new mechanism – a dominance that may have emerged for historical, contingent reasons. With this book, we want to broaden the scope of the discussion, going back to the roots of mechanistic explanations in physics. We divided the book into three parts. Part I is made up by three chapters that compare the traditional mechanical explanations of early modern science and philosophy to the current accounts of mechanistic explanations. The three chapters of Part II deal with general questions concerning the relations between mechanisms, causality, and the multi-level structure of complex systems in physics and beyond. Finally, Part III collects four studies that investigate the scope of mechanistic explanations in different sciences, making the bridge from physics to economics, complexity and computation theory.