Robert Boyle used "mechanical philosophers" to refer both to those with a theory of "corpuscles" or atoms of matter, such as Gassendi and Descartes, and those who did without such a theory.

Richard Westfall deems him a mechanical philosopher.

In response to the claim in Whewell's treatise that "We may thus, with the greatest propriety, deny to the mechanical philosophers and mathematicians of recent times any authority with regard to their views of the administration of the universe", Charles Babbage published what he called The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, A Fragment.

Where natural substances had previously been understood organically, the mechanical philosophers viewed them as machines.

Pask, the mechanical philosopher, wanted to apply these ideas to bring a new kind of rigour to cybernetic models.

The general approach of the mechanical philosophers was to postulate theories of the kind now called "contact action".

Speculations about the fundamental structure of matter from Democritus to the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers and beyond are construed as categorically distinct from atomic theories amenable to experimental investigation and support and as contributing little to the latter from a historical point of view.

If, as suspected by mechanical philosophers like Torricelli and Pascal, air had lateral weight, the weight of the air would be less at higher altitudes.