As with logical empiricism, the new mechanical philosophy is less a systematic and coherent set of doctrines than it is an orientation to the subject matter of the philosophy of science. The approach emerged as philosophers and historians of science began to break from the once-standard practice of reconstructing scientific inference with the tools of logic and, instead, to embrace detailed investigation of actual episodes from the history of science. The main tenets of logical empiricism had been under intense criticism for decades, and a new era of historically informed philosophy of science had taken hold through the works of, e.g., Kuhn (1962), Laudan (1977), and Lakatos (1977). To many such scholars raised in this post-logical empiricist milieu, it appeared that much of the practice of contemporary science (both in the laboratory and in print) was driven by the search for mechanisms, that many of the grand achievements in the history of science were discoveries of mechanisms, and that more traditional philosophy of science, for whatever reason, had failed to appreciate this central feature of the scientific worldview.