The new mechanical philosophy emerged around the turn of the twenty-first century as a new framework for thinking about the philosophy of science. The philosophers who developed this framework were, by comparison with the logical empiricists, practitioners as well of the history of science and tended, by and large, to focus on the biological, rather than physical, sciences. Many new mechanists developed their framework explicitly as a successor to logical empiricist treatments of causation, levels, explanation, laws of nature, reduction, and discovery. 