Mechanics in the context of history

It is very tempting to follow the mathematicians and present classical mechanics in an axiomatic or postulational way, especially in a book about theory and methods. Newton wrote in that way for reasons that are described in Westfall's biography (1980). Following the abstract Euclidean mode of presentation would divorce our subject superficially from the history of western European thought and therefore from its real foundations, which are abstractions based upon reproducible empiricism. A postulational approach, which is really a Platonic approach, would mask the way that universal laws of regularities of nature were discovered in the late middle ages in an atmosphere where authoritarian religious academics purported pseudo-scientifically to justify the burning of witches and other nonconformers to official dogma, and also tried to define science by the appeal to authority.