Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century

Thinking with Objects offers a fresh view of the transformation that took place in mechanics during the 17th century. By giving center stage to objects—levers, inclined planes, beams, pendulums, springs, and falling and projected bodies—Domenico Bertoloni Meli provides a unique and comprehensive portrayal of mechanics as practitioners understood it at the time.

Bertoloni Meli reexamines such major texts as Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy,...