ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the varieties of mechanisms that exist in the world, rather than the variety of philosophical or methodological approaches that have gone by the name of "Mechanism" or "mechanical philosophy". There are certainly varieties of mechanical philosophies just as there are varieties of mechanisms, and some philosophers have offered taxonomies of those varieties. A mechanism for a phenomenon consists of entities whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon. While mechanical philosophy owes much in its origins to analogies with machines of human construction, the etiology of such mechanisms is typically unlike that of mechanisms responsible for naturally occurring phenomena. Because mechanisms are localized in space and time, they must have etiologies—that is to say, there must be some causal process that led up to their existence. In a recent unpublished paper, Levy and Bechtel have argued that it is time to move to "Mechanism 2.0".
