Carl Craver

Professor Craver is a philosopher of neuroscience trying to understand how minds fit in a world of causes. His 2007 book, Explaining the Brain, is now considered a locus classicus in the new mechanistic philosophy. The book develops a philosophically grounded but scientifically attentive model of how we explain things by describing their mechanisms at multiple levels of organization. The book builds a systematic model of mechanisms and levels out of philosophically familiar ontological resources (causation and part/whole relations) and shows how the experimental practices of the special sciences are organized in the service of establishing these multilevel mechanistic relations. It has become a much-cited touchstone inside and outside philosophy for articulating the explanatory aims of the neurosciences.

His 2013 book in collaboration with Lindley Darden at the University of Maryland, In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries Across the Life Sciences extends his work on explanation with an historically grounded book about how scientists make discoveries in mechanistic sciences. This book embodies the Baconian spirit of seeking to codify a clear expression of the norms that animate science and that justify respect for science as a way of knowing the world (a central, animating commitment that runs throughout Craver's work).

More recently, Craver is pursuing topics in psychiatric genetics and neuropsychology. His work in psychiatric genetics, in collaboration with a group headed by Ken Kendler at Virginia Commonwealth University since 2017, asks whether, and if so how, data from GWAS can be mined to yield coherent mechanistic information about psychiatric disorders. His neuropsychology research, in collaboration with a group headed by Shayna Rosenbaum at York University since 2010, studies individuals with episodic amnesia to discover how remembrance does (and, crucially, does not) figure essentially in the lives distinctive of persons. This latter project is the subject of a new book-in-progress, tentatively titled: Living without Memory.

You can get a sense of his research by visiting his google scholar page and tracing the links to individual papers.